60 seconds with Imprint Digital Jo Francis Thursday, April 29, 2021
Keith Sutherland started the firm that became Imprint Digital in 1972 when he was “thrown out of university for failing to do any work on my Masters’ degree”. This was because he was also organising a major campaign for a charity which needed a lot of printed material “so I leased a little Gestetner offset press. Once the campaign was over I had to take on commercial work just to pay the lease!”
Where are you based?
Imprint Digital has moved half a dozen times. After offset, I moved into academic publishing and then digital printing. Our first digital press (bought around 1990) was an HP LaserJet rigged up in the spare room of a country cottage. We then moved to a converted farm building on an equestrian centre in the Devon countryside and then (at the peak of Covid lockdown) into a purpose-built factory
Harry Potter. Sarah is currently Editor-at-Large for Pushkin Children’s Books, where she continues to blaze new trails by championing unique new voices - many of which have won major awards. She’s also the co-founder and Editor of
Scoop magazine (“a feast of words and pictures for curious kids”), and co-founder of Accord Literary, a ground-breaking project dedicated to developing and publishing African writers for young readers. Read on to enjoy Sarah’s fascinating account of her life in publishing (and beyond) - her passion is infectious, her insights utterly unique.
Please could you share an overview of your career?
Monique Roffey is an award-winning writer born in Trinidad in 1965 whose novels include
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle and
House of Ashes, which were shortlisted, respectively, for the Orange and the Costa prizes. She is also a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School. Her sixth novel,
The Mermaid of Black Conch, won the Costa book of the year and is shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio prize, announced on 24 March.
1. Art
Bottle and bowl with poetry in Persian, 1180–1220, Iran.
This may well be the first thing I go and see on 21 June. They’ve got something like 350 objects that go back over 5,000 years. I’m completely magnetised by Iran and yet, it’s so mysterious and so closed off to us. I’m obsessed with looking at artefacts. I saw the Buddhist display not long ago at the V&A and I loved that. I like looking at old things. At the Museum of London, they have tons of things they found in the Thames, from hairy mammoth skulls to Viking helmets to