CLIVE JUDD &
​MARIA LOMUNNO JUDD

voce books, birmingham

we caught up with Voce Books’ co-owners Clive and Maria to hear all about their first year of busINess, their core bookselling ethos, live events, indie publishing staples, and some of the exciting plans ahead for one of Birmingham’s newest literary & cultural hubs.

It’s just the most incredible city. And I think a positive outcome of a populous of people who have just gone, ‘You know what? I just don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you think about us. We’re just gonna crack on and get on with it!’ 
And have built this incredible, vibrant, interesting, diverse and engaged ecosystem of thinkers and small businesses!

JR: You’ve both come to bookselling with you’re own quite unique and interesting stories. But before we come on to you individually, I was wondering if we could start by talking about the shop. 

So, you opened when, was it November 2022?

MLJ: Yes, that’s right.

JR: How was that first Christmas and how did you find settling into your own indie bookshop?

MLJ: So, that first Christmas, we knew it would be quite difficult opening a shop and getting right into Christmas; having our first Christmas a few weeks after we opened, but Christmas was definitely better than we were expecting. We had quite a quick response from people; we already had quite a small community around us by the time the Christmas rush started. So, it was difficult I suppose because of admin and trying to understand what we needed to order and how much of each title we needed to order but in terms of the day-to-day, and in terms of people’s responses, we were quite surprised to see that we already had a bit of a platform and a bit of a community around us. So, it was definitely better than we were expecting and what we were planning for. 

CJ: I think one of the things about why we were able to hit the ground running, maybe a bit quicker than we were expecting, was that the work we did to build an identity and a profile before the shop even opened and actually, we didn't release a single image of the inside of the shop until the day we opened. 

So, a couple of things: one, we ignored that advice of, ‘Don’t do something just before Christmas!’ We ignored that entirely. And we also, [we] ignored the advice of allowing people a window into your aesthetic. We did sort of teaser-based stuff which was far more about discussing the kind of vibe of the bookshop and how we were going to approach bookselling, and making people more interested in what we were before we even showed them what we looked like.  So, on that first day when we revealed the first images of the shop, there was this sort of sense of anticipation that was then, I guess, matched by what we’d done to make the shop look as beautiful and as presentable as we could. 

It all helps, giving us a really, really good start, like six weeks off. We may have only been open for six or seven weeks before Christmas but actually, we’d been in people’s brains and consciousness for a much longer period. 

JR: And that’s one of the hardest parts of opening any business, isn’t it? I mean, that awareness even before you open the doors. There’s that fear that you could open the doors and no one’s there. It’s building that relationship early.

How have you found using social media and having an online presence in order to do that? Has that been useful?

MLJ: It’s been quite necessary for us because we are in a very low-footfall area. We need to keep up and plan all of our social media activities because it’s what keeps us alive, it’s what gets people in. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of planning. Nothing is ever left to chance. But it’s so important to us, it’s what allows us to be open, really.

CJ: We always wanted the shop to be a character. It probably comes from the fact that I come from a background in theatre-making, in that I can’t not think about space as a character itself, and that’s the interest I have in my writing practice as well. So when we started, we wanted all of our social media to feel like it wasn’t myself or Maria but this other entity that you’re going to get to know and come to love, and we’re actually just the people who steer it a little bit. So yeah, social media’s been really important in that first - we’re just over a year now - it’s been important in disseminating a message and building a sort of consistency to some of our projects and our outlook and our goals with the bookshop. 

JR: And that will have changed over time, surely? I mean, you’ve had two Christmases, you’ve had two Januarys, and a whole year to discover what that shop is and what that feel is. 

Have you found your outlook on the shop changed in that time? Do you feel like you’ve allowed it to grow or have you been quite strict in that you had a vision and had to stick to it? 

CJ: I think the vision we have today isn’t too dissimilar to what it was on the 8th of November 2022, actually. If anything, it’s a bit more developed. And one of the things we’ve been very keen to do is to build in a slow fashion. We have lots and lots of plans for the shop but at the moment we haven’t even got near evening planning or thinking about it properly because each element requires its own space and time. So, the first thing, or the first example of that, is the events programme. 
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Last year was a lot of work embedding the concept of our events into our customer base's minds and actually learning how to deliver those events in our space. That's taken a lot of our time which means we can’t do some of the other things that we’d like to pursue but we’re totally fine with that. It’s one step at a time. If we’d realised within six months that there was no appetite for the kind of shop that we wanted to run we would’ve walked away, put it down, or tried something different. And there’s certainly been some things we’d had to rethink along the way but the majority of our goals we’re still striving towards and they’re the same goals that we had when we opened the shop. 

MLJ: As the shop goes, it’s quite unpredictable, so you really need to - even if you’ve got your goals in mind - you really need to find different ways to reach them. We’ve had a year now and we’re probably more able to predict our month’s goals and how the shop works throughout the year, but before that, you need to be able to adapt to what’s happening. We both had extensive bookselling experience before, but this is a completely different thing for both of us so we’re just trying to respond to what happens. We know that we need to adapt to what happens, even in the city, not just in the bookselling industry. There are many, many elements that change constantly.

JR: For those who haven’t been to the shop before, can you explain the shop’s focus and speciality which might make it stand out from other shops in the area?

CJ: Well, predominantly, the focus is on small and independent presses, so we tend to foreground books that you don’t necessarily find in a pile on a table in bigger chain bookshops, and there are lots of different ways we introduce those to customers. We shelve all our books by publisher rather than in a blanket A-Z in the hope that you foster dedication to individual publishers, and that’s demonstrable in the way that people engage with the shop. 

There are exceptions, it’s not a blanket ‘only indies’. We have books that when you see them they make sense, like classic texts, you might have Angela Davis or Silvia Federici in there. That’s a cornerstone of the kind of stuff that we’re interested in stocking and you can’t read some of the books that are on our shelves really without a knowledge that they came from these foundational books and ideas. So, we have a mix, we have poetry and non-fiction sections, again, predominantly independent focused but we’re really interested in the books that are at the intersection of politics and culture, we think that’s where people’s minds expand, that’s where we can make changes in the way people think about the society they live in or the books they read or concepts of the future. It all comes at that intersection between politics and culture. It’s a very Mark Fisher lead section, who I think is one of the foundational fathers of our non-fiction section, really. 

MLJ: Whereas, for the fiction section, I would say translated fiction is the main thing. Only because independent publishers are doing that, mostly, and also because of my background and because it’s something that’s slowly growing in the UK. It wasn’t something that you could easily find anywhere. We also have a book club that is based almost exclusively on translated fiction. 

JR: There seems to be more of an appetite for translation, more so in the last few years, don’t you think? 

MLJ: Yeah, absolutely.

JR: Which has been amazing. There are more and more of these kinds of book clubs coming up. It’s heartwarming to know that there are people out there looking past our borders and looking for amazing voices from around the world. 

How do you find the balance between your book clubs and events? Because it’s just the two of you, is that right? 

CJ / MLJ: Yeah.

JR: I mean, it’s a lot of work for any shop but especially when it’s just two. How do you find the event programme working within your day-to-day?

CJ: It’s sort of integrated now, it’s a fundamental part of what we do. I’m really fortunate to have run the events programme for Foyles and you can’t really get bigger training than somewhere like that in the UK. When you’re dealing with two or three events a week that may bring two hundred people into a space and making sure that everybody, from the author down to the audience and the people working with you on that event night, are satisfied and that you deliver a strong and interesting and engaging event. I think that there’s no better grounding. So, when we started the shop events were always going to be a focus for us but what we have realised over the last twelve months is that it’s a fundamental way of introducing the shop to people and the events now are a real mix, of people who are coming back regularly and new people who are engaging with the bookshop for the first time. That gives you a signal that that’s an integral part of the business and something that we need to spend a lot of time thinking about, and I think, probably, now sixty to seventy per cent of my thinking and my time is taken up with organising and delivering events.

JR: And how do you split the work between the two of you? Do you feel like managing stock is maybe one person’s role more than another, or do you find that you end up doing a bit of both?

MLJ: I’d say we do a bit of both. We basically work together on pretty much everything, but in terms of practical tasks, maybe Clive is more involved in the event organisation and also with social media, a bit more than me I’d say, whereas I do more of the admin and the stock, seeing reps and ordering new titles. That’s a bit more me.

CJ: And again, with the skills Maria had working with Foyles and in her parallel work as well.

JR: Let’s touch on that, then. Tell me a little more about your backgrounds individually. I mean, I read somewhere that you come from a theatre and bookselling background, starting with Waterstones and then moving to Foyles, Clive, is that right? And Maria, you were with And Other Stories at one point and then Foyles as well?

MLJ: Yep.

CJ: Well, I started bookselling in 2009 as a Christmas temp and I stayed with bookselling for the next, well, now it’s my fifteenth year, I think. On and off during that time. When I started in bookselling it was as a way to pay my rent and also help as I was pursuing a theatre career. I was a theatre director, or predominantly a theatre director, and that was the balance for the majority of the time, I’d be trying to pursue this career with bookselling in the background. I’d leave bookselling and I’d always come back. And then around 2017 something slightly changed in my mind and I realised that bookselling wasn’t just this side hustle and I wasn’t treating it with the respect that it was owed. 
Bookselling gave me so much, it’s widened my horizons and given me so many different skills, and I realised that the two parts of my life that I’d been juggling and maybe in a way been trying to keep separate were actually one and the same. I could be the same person in both of those environments. 
So, since 2017-2018 I’ve been writing and directing but also bookselling, running events, and now I think they all feed each other, you know. The skills I’ve learned in performing arts and in theatre and writing feed directly into the work that I do in the bookshop. There’s no better grounding than the performing arts, I suppose.

MLJ: I moved to England from Italy in 2012. I had an EU scholarship and the plan was to have a working experience in England for six months and then go back to Italy and use those skills, which clearly didn't happen.
I worked with And Other Stories for six months and then had a couple of other experiences in publishing before starting at Foyles. I worked in many different branches, different sections. At the time, Foyles, I mean, pre-Waterstones Foyles, booksellers had a lot of responsibility. We actually managed our own sections, we met our own reps. We had a lot of agency, so there wasn’t any better school to learn the basics, even the admin basics of the job and getting to know the industry. I worked in Foyles for five years and after that one of the publishers I worked for asked me if I wanted to join them in the sales department, and so I did that and I’m still with that theatre publisher now.

But, anyway, what I always found by working at Foyles was that for a person who loves books, bookselling is the right job, rather than publishing, because it’s what gives you the most complete idea of the industry. That’s how you get to know what is actually going on in the industry, and what the tendencies are. That’s bookselling, that’s not publishing. When you work in publishing you only know, well, you mainly know, what you’re doing in your own very small portion of the industry that you’re working for. I always wanted to go back to bookselling somehow. 

JR: That’s interesting. I’ve spoken to several people in publishing with a similar view, that they see a world outside of whichever publishing viewfinder they have, whatever kind of targets they have to meet or projects they’re working on, and returning in some way to bookselling. Often in some sort of fantasy retirement.

Do you two find that, with backgrounds in theatre and publishing, or writing, do you find that it’s affected the kind of books that you stock? Do you think there’s any direct correlation there? 

CJ: Not with theatre at all. We don’t stock any theatre or drama books in the shop at all. We just at the moment don’t feel like there’s an audience for it in our particular shop, and that might change. So, it’s not, this shop isn’t led entirely by our interests.

JR: Sure.

CJ: Not in that direct regard, but in other ways I suppose it is entirely. Again, that sort of advice that says, ‘Don’t only stock the books you like’; I think we’ve cast that out entirely. Our shop is only small, it’s only one hundred and fifty square feet; so it’s a small footprint but we’re now cramming in lots of books and we are expanding the shelves in a week’s time, actually, to add more publishers and more books. 
But yeah, there’s nothing on our shelves that we don’t have a story for and that we don’t believe in. That’s a really good bit of advice that we did take, which is to have a story for every book that you stock.

Some sections are very, very much in our direct interests. So, as Maria said about translated fiction, that’s something we’re both passionate about, particularly Maria. And I love books on place and psychogeography and the history of walking, and those subjects are related to my writing practice and so that’s probably where - it’s more theoretical books that I have an interest in - that’s directly reflected on the shelves. Rather than my theatre practice which I think is a little bit too… You need a customer base for it and we’re not sure that’s there in Birmingham at the moment. 

JR: I’m curious why you chose Birmingham, because you were both working in London, right?

MLJ: Yeah.

CJ: Well, I’m from the Midlands and… It’s very difficult to talk about this without sounding cynical. 

The first thing is when we were thinking about a bookshop in more real terms, which, like yourself, was during the pandemic when our mindsets were changing and [we] were able to look at our circumstances and where we were at and what we wanted from our lives, we started to look outside of London and Maria actually mentioned Birmingham the first time. 

I’d lived here ten years ago and loved the city. I’ve always wanted to come back but I never thought that I would and got to a point where I had a life in London and had a job that I enjoyed, and friends. But yeah, during that period of lockdown, things started to shift and move, and the minute Maria mentioned Birmingham I couldn’t think of a bookshop that was quite like ours, in Birmingham, and I’d always known that Birmingham had historically a paucity of independent bookshops. So we came on a couple of visits and looked around and kept an eye on what was taking place in the city and we just felt like it was the right place to try and do this very specific type of bookshop. Because it didn’t exist in the way that we wanted to do it. 
Around the time we opened, we weren’t the only bookshop in Birmingham to open around that period, I think, there was a sort of similar feeling that Birmingham required us, it needed us, in a way that other cities we’d visited, or maybe thought could have a bookshop like our own, they just didn’t talk to us in the way this city did. So in the end it felt like a very natural move to the midlands, or move back to the midlands, for me. Which I’m very happy about. 

JR: And Maria, how have you found being in the midlands and Birmingham?

MLJ: Well, before we moved we had loads of people say, ‘Why are you going to Birmingham?’ Like, ‘Of all the cities you could go to, why are you choosing that one?’ But I came here without any prejudice because I’m not from here, so I’m outside any sort of discussion about first city, second city, what’s best, what’s worst. And I find the city full of energy and full of potential. Maybe because it’s one of the youngest cities in Europe, in terms of population, but also because there’s so much work to be done. Like, it really is dynamic in a way that other cities with more established bookshop ecosystems are not because they’ve been living on that ecosystem for ages. Whereas here, there’s still a lot of work to be done and there is, as we said, already such a positive response from people. So yeah, I came here not really knowing what to expect but so far the energy I’ve been feeling has been really positive and encouraging. We’ll see if we can continue like this but for now, it feels like the right place to be. 

JR: Online you describe the shop as being quite future-focused and I feel like Birmingham really does represent that at the moment. Certainly, as an outsider, it seems like there are a lot of new businesses and those businesses seem to be thriving. Do you think that that’s true?

CJ: It’s really hard, I mean, it’s a poor city. It’s not helped by some of the issues that are taking place within the council at the moment. It’s a technically bankrupt council. But, you often see, historically, that during times of social and political turmoil, you get a lot of art. 

I know that, again, using theatre as an example, the eighties and the mid-nineties when these moments of political change it’s probably when we found the most energy to make new work. We’ve seen lots of new styles and new approaches coming out of anger and frustration, and I think we’re in one of those moments, really. And Birmingham has this other layer to it as well, of constantly having been denigrated and dumbed down and put down by people who don’t really know what goes on here. 
You often get people who are surprised by the amount of stuff that is going on or surprised that Birmingham has this incredible food scene, which is probably one of the best in the UK. It’s just unbelievable and it’s not just Michelin Star restaurants, we’re talking about standard street food. It’s just the most incredible city. And I think a positive outcome of a populous of people who have just gone, ‘You know what? I just don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you think about us. We’re just gonna crack on and get on with it!’ And have built this incredible, vibrant, interesting, diverse and engaged ecosystem of thinkers and small businesses and projects. 
I mean, just by our shop, there's got to be about seven or eight, nine, ten, galleries in Digbeth alone, you know, independent galleries. You can wander around Digbeth and just get lost in art and culture and this is not the story that’s necessarily being told about Birmingham. These are untold stories that are happening under the surface but they’re really there. So for us, to be a part of that and part of building a new literary scene it’s really, really thrilling, I think. 

MLJ: I think the other thing is being able to manage expectations in terms of growth because resources are limited, so growth is going to happen but it’s going to be slow. And we’re okay with that. We started with very low expectations. When we ran the numbers the numbers were really low, and we knew, and we know now, that growth happens but it’s slower than you might expect in London or in Bristol. But we’re fine with that. We’re organised to cope with that, so for now it’s going well. 

JR: Online you also describe the shop as having a new and unusual and unexpected focus. I think the new and unusual is obviously your day-to-day, but I was wondering if you had any examples of books that came as an unexpected surprise since opening, anything that’s performed particularly well or any unexpected bestsellers? 

CJ: Yeah, there’s loads, actually. There are loads of examples. The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June-Alison Gibbons; a 1981 outsider novel. I think the story behind that is fascinating. The book was written by a sixteen-year-old which you both can’t see that in the writing but you can see it as well. The sentence construction of the book is almost made up, you know, which would make sense bearing in mind that she hadn’t spoken as a child, but spoken a made-up language with her sister. So, that one is a perfect example of the kind of surprising book that we can offer people, in numbers that you might not see, you definitely won’t see that in Waterstones. I’d wager that you won’t find a copy of that book in many Waterstones branches. And we’ve sold lots of that. A striking cover, an incredible backstory, but actually, the material itself is fantastic. 
So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what is this year’s Pepsi-Cola. That’s my desire for the year, to find another book like that, that takes me by surprise and the readers by surprise. 

MLJ: We sold a lot of copies of a book called, The Sky is Falling, which is the first book of Another Gaze [Editions]. Another Gaze has already got a magazine and they’re just starting publishing books and that was their first book and it was a translation from an Italian novel by Lorenza Mazzetti, who’s a filmmaker, long dead, even Italy doesn’t remember her, but they brought her book back. They made this amazing illustrated edition with Mazzetti’s own illustrations and people just love it. We did a book club around it and last year it was one of our bestsellers. Even that one, I don’t think you'd find that book in many places. 

JR: Yeah, I spotted you talking about it online and it’s definitely not one that I have seen anywhere else, actually. Which is great, it’s exactly what you want to find in a shop like yours.

CJ: Yeah, I think The Foward Prize poet Luke Kennard is another one of our - he pops into the shop quite regularly because he lives in Birmingham and teaches at the university - and he said that, about picking up The Pepsi-Cola Addict, that it’s exactly what our shop is for. And it’s finding those gems that you just wouldn’t discover unless somebody who had their nose to the ground had put it in front of you.

JR: Yes.

CJ: And those two books are perfect examples of where we can make an intervention. 

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JR: Let's just talk about the bookselling landscape of Birmingham. I mean, I know that you mentioned there being some pre-existing and some new, like yourselves. I know that you’ve got a Waterstones, you’ve also got a Foyles in Birmingham. But in recent years: Bookshop on the Green, MyBookBasket, and The Heath Bookshop as well. 

Are there any others in your neighbourhood and how do you cope with the proximity and relationships with other booksellers in the area? 

CJ: We have really good relationships with everybody, actually. We’re all doing such different things that there isn’t a conflict of interest, we’ve all got a particular style or feel. In the city centre, I guess, there’s Court 15 Books which is a secondhand bookshop that is so supportive of what we do, helping to share our social media posts and details about our events. And that relationship goes both ways, we’ll do the same for them. 

We’ve got a co-event with The Heath Bookshop coming up which is the first time we’ve collaborated that directly. It’s an author that we both really like, we’re paring up to do an event. 
And then last summer during Independent Bookshop Week a number of the bookshops in Birmingham got together to put together a sort of unified programme of events. So, there’s a real appetite for us to work together and I think the thing with bookshops is the more the better, really. The more bookshops you have, the more book buyers come, and not from just your own cities and towns but from outside of that as well. 

We took a trip to Bristol before we opened to just wander around and go to all of the amazing bookshops that are available in that city, and they’re all very different and they all have their own ethos and style and we loved that. So we’re hoping that we’re not the last, really, and I’m sure we won’t be because there’s plenty of space in Birmingham.

JR: I’m quite interested in your Borderless, Futures, Introducing, and Home; the kind of categories you place on some of your events. Can you explain some of those to us and how they fit into your event programme?

CJ: It’s two-fold really. One, I thought it was a really good way of introducing to customers or audiences what we are about, and what our interests are, and those words and those categories help us mainline exactly what it is, and what that event is about. So it is for customers and audiences but actually, it’s also for us to ensure that we’re thinking in a joined-up fashion about our events. 
So, if we get a proposal and it doesn’t quite fit into that structure that’s because we’ve thought very hard about what the structure is and it allows us to go, “Well, that’s not quite for us’, or, ‘We don’t work in that way, this is how we work.’ And I think that’s a long-term project. It’s a long-term way of introducing strands of thinking and the hope is that some people will go, ‘Well, I really like your Futures events so I’m going to keep an eye out for the red posts because I know that’s going to be for me.’ And maybe down the line, there’ll be a way of, when we have a website, looking at how we market those events and try to hit the right people. 

The main thing is just to show that we don’t put on events for the sake of putting on events. They’re very, very much linked to our core principles and it displays to customers and audiences what those core principles are. And I think from those words, which we thought long and hard about and worked with our designer on cultivating, I think that they’re evocative. Like Borderless just feels evocative and provocative as well. It tells everybody what we’re about and if you’re not on board with that, so what?

JR: And too right.

CJ: We are a borderless bookshop. We’re from a working-class background, Maria is from Italy. The things we see in our lives and in society that frustrate us, we want to be the antithesis of that with the bookshop, and words like borderless… people get it right away.

JR: Absolutely. And it’s yours. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation, isn’t it? Now, you can do what you want. It must be quite freeing that you’re not working in a more corporate environment, especially now that Foyles has changed hands. 

I’m interested in how that has felt, you leaving Foyles, specifically, but going into the indie world and how your perceptions of the industry might’ve changed.

MLJ: Well, starting your own company is obviously very exciting but also very scary. Exciting because as you say, we’re fairly free to do whatever we want to do; not because we want to reject whatever we’ve done before, but we’ve done that before and we now have a very clear idea of where we want to go and we’ve got the freedom to do that. And again, it can be scary sometimes. It can also be exhausting. But it’s amazing to be able to just use your own ideas and pursue whatever you want to and with the knowledge of the industry as a background, obviously. 

CJ: When you work for someone else you can give a hell of a lot of yourself to a workplace and not see enough of that come back the other way. And that’s the nature of working for bigger businesses, I think. When you have your own thing any yield you get, anything that comes back is yours and it’s the fruits of your labour and I love that. I love to see an idea go from an idea to something that we deliver and people enjoy it or come back or they write to us or they buy books. That’s fantastic. 
You also, when you work for other people, can't be entirely yourself. With the shop, what’s so freeing is to be able to say, ‘No, we’re not doing that’, ‘that isn’t us.’ It’s much easier to have those conversations where you outline exactly what you are. I’m here to spend time with the people who have really engaged with what we’re trying to do here and not people who just come in with their own agendas and they’ve not taken any time to work out what you are. It’s really freeing. 

MLJ: I mean it’s really liberating to know things can be done in very different ways. When your only thing is the corporate world, they tell you what to do, when there’s only one way. Even Foyles, pre-Waterstones, you were quite free to do stuff. There still are lots of people with quite strong personalities there, who will do their own thing. But it’s very liberating to see that you can do things in many ways and people love the fact that there’s a bit of you in what you do. There’s a bit of your personality in what you do. 

CJ: We’re so supportive of what’s happening in Birmingham, literary-wise. If you look at just that sort of Home strand, the events that are banded in a yellow colour, there are loads of them. We found it really important to respect what was going on in Birmingham already in the literary culture and provide a place for people who were already doing stuff. But at the same time, we’re trying to introduce new people into that culture as well, into that literary culture of Birmingham. So, we don’t reject everybody who walks in with a book in their hand, it’s just there’s a way of working with us that is really fruitful and beneficial to both the bookshop and the person who is approaching us. Whether you’re approaching us as a customer, as a publisher, or a self-published writer, or an artist.

MLJ: I mean, as a result of this we’ve made so many friends in the bookshop, it’s unbelievable. We now have personal relationships with loads of our regulars because we are ourselves all the time. 

JR: And it’s so important to have those relationships. Especially because of the size of the shop, you’re going to get to talk to everybody, you know. You’re not necessarily going to be able to go into the shop and be completely anonymous. You can form those conversations and you can hand-pick something and you can offer those recommendations because it is just the two of you. 

Let’s finish by talking about some books, shall we?

We’ve kind of already talked about the balance of stock and your individual interests, but I was wondering if you had any go-to staff picks or recommendations that you will always have on hand and you’re always able to pull out for someone.

CJ: Absolutely. 

MLJ: I suppose Claudia Piñeiro is an author that we always recommend. We were able to sell loads of the first two books that became available, Elena Knows and A Little Luck [Charco Press], and there’s another book coming out this year after the summer. I think she’s an author for everyone because she started as a crime-fiction author but she’s now moved into more literary, sort of, still mystery plots but more literary, so she sort of responds to many of our customers’ tastes and requests. So, Claudia Piñeiro, the Argentinian author is definitely one of our go-to authors and has been since the very beginning. 

CJ: For me, the Birmingham writer Joel Lane, who has been reissued over the last few years by Influx Press. He lived in Birmingham, he was Birmingham through and through, and wrote about the city as a character. There’s no other writer I have ever encountered who captured Birmingham in all of its weird and unsettling glory. So, he’s my go-to. And even though he was writing horror and word fiction I still put that in the hands of people who are just looking for something that's just about Birmingham or that geographical specificity. There’s one of his stories in Where Furnaces Burn that is set in an archway that is twenty seconds outside of our shop.

JR: Really?

CJ: It’s an absolute joy to be able to recommend his books to people. 

JR: That’s very special. 

And you’ve had a month of this year now. Have you seen anything that has stood out in the last month as doing particularly well?

CJ: Yes, our next book club title is Centroeuropa by Peninsula Press and by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery. We’re selling a lot of that and that’s not just because of the book club, actually - although, it’s the first time we’ve ever listed our book club on Eventbrite and the pick up for that particular event has been high - it’s been a mixture of people who are buying the book for the book club but also just picking up off a recommendation. 

Overall, actually, just books aside, just on the performance of the shop, it’s been so good. Probably in some ways better than December, which might give you a window into our customer base. Not everybody celebrates Christmas. I think sometimes we forget that. But we have a really, really wide and diverse customer base and I think we won't see December ever performing in the way that it does in massive bookshops because of our customer base. Even if you’ve celebrated Christmas historically, like myself; my relationship with that season and that festival has changed so much since I've become an adult, you know, I don't think about it quite as much anymore. So, we’re not hugely surprised that the shop doesn’t perform vastly better in December. I suppose we are quite surprised that January, which is always a straightened month for everybody, has performed quite as well as it has but I hope that that’s a sign that what we’re doing is working and will continue into the New Year. 

JR: You’re absolutely right, I think you do need to look at your progress through the eyes of your neighbourhood; it’s as important as the spreadsheets or the bestselling charts, reading the people who are actually coming through your door. But it all sounds like the sign of a healthy shop if you can keep the tills ringing through January.

Right, finally, are there any books that are coming out in the next couple of months or so that you’re particularly looking forward to? 

CJ: It always trips me up that question!

MLJ: Yeah.

CJ: Well, actually it’s a book that’s just been released but I think it’s going to be one of our biggest of the first half of the year, which is Balsom Karam’s, The Singularity, published by Fitzcarraldo. We do have an event for that and that’s already sell quite well, we’re already seeing a lot of people interested in that book. I think that some of my favourite books of the past few years have been Fitzcarraldo books. I’m excited about the potential of that book and what that’s going to do for us.

MLJ: Another publisher that we work with now is Heloise Press based in Canterbury. We’ve got an event with one of their authors but it’s already the second event with them. Tone - 

CJ: - Tone Schunnesson. You’re doing an event as well, right?

JR: Yes, that’s right. It was timed quite nicely that the tour is happening towards the end of February as I was hoping to link it to Newcastle City Library’s Women’s History Month events, and look at contemporary female writers and new voices coming to the UK. I wanted to bring something a bit different and a bit special for that. I’m looking forward to that one as well.

Did I see somewhere that you’re doing the event with the translator?

CJ: No, unfortunately not. But that’s Saskia Vogel, isn’t it? Who translated The Singularity as well, and translated Strega as well, which is massive.

MLJ: And one of our bestsellers.

CJ: A Lolli Editions book. 

No, we haven’t got a chairperson for it just yet. Maria is doing the event with Balsam Karam so we try not to do everything, we like to get others in to mix it up a little. Otherwise, people will just get sick of our voices, I think. But yeah, we’re not sure yet. 

But we want to do that a bit more [with translators] and we’re planning for later in the year a translation festival which will bring together other translators, authors, and publishers who are predominantly working in translated fiction. We will deliver that sometime around, I think, late October-November time. We’re just sort of pulling that together at the moment. 

But we’re yet to do one with a translator. We did have an event with Dorothy Tse last year for Owlish [Fitzcarraldo Editions] with the translator but she didn’t make it to the UK in the end. That would’ve been our first one where we’d have both of them in conversation.

JR: Yeah, I’d just selfishly really want to sit in the audience and see that conversation happen. We don’t get to often see behind-the-scenes like that. As a reader, I’d like to find out more about all that, the process of translating. So yeah, I’m down. If that’s October-November I’ll be coming to that! 

CJ: Yeah, so Maria asks those sorts of questions having done some translation work herself, and understanding, I guess, language in a way that is very different to my understanding. I don’t speak another language, Maria speaks two other languages on top of her own language, so yeah, it’s interesting, the questions that she asks in those events about the process of finding the right phrase.

Rahul Bery is sending us an introduction for the next book club. As he was so pleased that we were choosing to talk about his translation, I think he felt like he wanted to be part of the club and it felt like he wished he was there himself, you know. He’s writing something for us to deliver to the group.

JR: That’s very special, and a very special thing for the book club to be gifted. 

MLJ: Especially for a book like that one where there are so many levels. It can be quite tricky to get all the details of that book it’ll also be really helpful to have someone with such insight, into the language and into the translation. It’ll be amazing!

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If you like the sound of these events, book clubs, and staff recommendations, make sure to go show your support online or in person and head to the Voce Books on Instagram, X or Bookshop.org for more details!