Borders Literature Online

Global Interviews

January 01, 2023
Minna Salami

Minna Salami

Minna Salami is a Scandinavian-Nigerian scholar whom it has been a privilege to encounter in person and on the pages of Sensuous Knowledge , her seminal work of epistemology. Alongside, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Decolonizing the Mind and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, it is Salami's Sensuous Knowledge that has informed my perspectives on the oppressive post-colonial world created by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her own pioneering work, Purple Hibiscus. From birth, Salami's life has played out against an uncommonly rich backdrop of diversity: geographic, cultural, linguistic and religious. Scheduled for release at midnight on New Year's Eve and to usher us into the hope of 2023, this interview sees Salami address a range of issues that are the focus of Sensuous Knowledge such as the tyranny of europatriarchal knowledge - the fitting term she coined. We discuss important if curious topics here also such as the branching pattern she expounds upon in the book which characterizes and binds the natural world in an ecosystem rooted in reciprocity and protest. Ultimately, the philosophical axis around which her themes spin is anchored in her heritage of plurality whose bequest is an outsider-insider status and a lifetime of inhabiting the liminal spaces. This bequest is the price Salami has paid for a world-view that shimmers with real hope for our planet and its people and Sensuous Knowledge is her vision - luminous and fully realisable - for our world.

Interview
December 12, 2022
Bodour Al Qasimi

Bodour Al Qasimi

For Bodour Al Qasimi, shaking up the global publishing industry did not begin in 2021 when she became President of the International Publishers Association. Her crusade began in 2009, with the foundation of the Emirates Publishers Association. EPA lost no time in transforming the once slow and archaic publishing industry of the United Arab Emirates into a regional and global heavy hitter. New narratives about UAE's publishing are being written everyday thanks for example to the creation of Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) established in 2014. On the world stage, the Authority is advancing the cause of publishing by means of strategic alliances with the IPA, one of which - the IPA Academy - Al Qasimi talks about in the discussion that follows. In her native Sharjah, the Authority is custodian to behemoth events which have become central to the global publishing calendar: Sharjah Children's Reading Festival which Al Qasimi founded in 2009 and the Sharjah International Book Fair, which is considered, after the trade fairs of Frankfurt and London , the most important book fair in the world. And likely the most glamorous.

Interview
July 26, 2022
Keith Hart

Keith Hart

Keith Hart, an economic anthropologist who lives in Paris and Durban, is known across the globe. He has taught in universities including Manchester, Yale, Chicago, Pretoria, London School of Economics (LSE) and for the longest time in Cambridge where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. A scholar of Africa and the African Diaspora, Keith Hart contributed the concept of the informal economy to Development Studies and has been described as "one of the most creative intellectuals of the last 50 years".

Interview
November 06, 2020
Hugo Andreas Setzer

Hugo Andreas Setzer

Hugo is CEO of Manual Moderno - a leading publishing house in the fields of medicine and psychology specialising in Spanish publications and based in Mexico City. At present, Hugo is president of the International Publishers Association, where he has also served on its Executive Committee from 2004 to 2010 and from 2013 to present. He has participated in the Mexican Publishers Association since 1995, where he has served on its executive board on several occasions and was vice-president from 2004 to 2006 and from 2010 to 2013. He served on the executive board of the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers from 1998 to 2004. Hugo was the founding chairman of the Mexican collective management organisation, CeMPro, from 1998 to 2002. He holds a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the National University in Mexico and an MBA degree from the IPADE Business School. Interview
February 20, 2020
Joy Sigaud

Joy Sigaud

Joy Sigaud is Editor of Editions Lifestyle: Black History Month magazine. She has edited and produced and number of publications including BHM 365, The Windrush 2019 Commemoration magazine and Expansion Today (Nigeria). She currently produces Editions Review newsletter; is guest contributor for a number of publications including The Voice, the Kensington Magazine and she has written for the UNHCR refugee publication With You. Through the music, she raises awareness of many of the issues she writes about by organising charity shows and concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Joy was born in England and has lived in both Jamaica, Nigeria and spends much time in France.
Interview
November 30, 2018
Michiel Kolman

Michiel Kolman

Dr. Michiel Kolman, PhD. is Senior VP of Information Industry Relations at Elsevier and President of the International Publishers Association. He is the executive sponsor of Elsevier Pride and was listed two years in a row in the FT's Top100 ranking of most influential LGBT senior executives. Since joining Elsevier in 1995, he has held various core publishing roles in Amsterdam and Tokyo. He launched one of the first online journals in the industry in 1996: New Astronomy. Michiel was Managing Director in Frankfurt, Germany. For 10 years, he spearheaded academic relations for Elsevier, building up a global network of ambassadors engaged in strategic discussions with research leaders. Prior to Elsevier, he worked for Wolters Kluwer in a division that is now part of Springer Nature. He holds a degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University in New York, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.

Michiel serves on the board of the Accessible Books Consortium that aims to make books available for the visually impaired. He also joined the board of the Workplace Pride Foundation supporting LGBTI workplace inclusion.
Interview
August 20, 2018
Michael Curran

Michael Curran

Michael Curran founded Tangerine Press in 2006. For the first seven years Curran published and bound the books after work as a builder, at weekends. A serious injury at the start of 2013 meant he had to leave 'The Building Game' and went full-time with the press later that year. In his own words:

"I landed myself with a back injury in January 2013. At 43 years of age I suddenly had to reassess everything. Tangerine was all I had so went head on with that, to try and make it a viable proposition"

Tangerine Press authors and artists have been longlisted and shortlisted for awards such as The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Athens Photobook Festival. Their books have been reviewed in Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, The Irish Times, Morning Star, New Statesman, The Scotsman, The Sunday Herald, Hackney Citizen, Black Country Bugle, Bookmunch, The Skinny, Never Imitate, Urban Fox, The Manchester Review, The Penniless Press, Stride, Humble Arts Foundation, American Suburb X, Dazed & Confused, &c.

Media coverage of the press itself includes: Times Literary Supplement, The Londonist, Courier, BBC Radio London, Beatscene, The Bookseller, The Irish Times, BBC 6Music’s Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service and a special feature on Channel 4 News.
Interview
September 18, 2018
Kristenn Einarsson

Kristenn Einarsson

Kristenn Einarsson is the chair of IPA's Freedom to Publish Committee. He is also Managing Director of the Norwegian Publishers Association. Einarsson has been in the publishing business for more than 40 years. He is the President of the Bjornson Academy (for literature and freedom of expression) and the chair of the board of two companies in Television distribution. He has previously been CEO of The Norwegian Book Clubs and Kuunskapsforlaget. He has also been the Chair of the Norwegian Film Fund and the Norwegian Film Council. Interview
April 30, 2018
Vanda Krefft

Vanda Krefft

Vanda Krefft is the author of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (HarperCollins, November 2017), the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox. A former entertainment industry journalist based in Los Angeles, she has an BA in English and an MA in Communication, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Interview