Cover Stories: Graham Swift; Ravi Mirchandani

The Literator
Friday 21 July 2006 00:00 BST
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.

The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.

Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.

*Two summers after the chaos at Penguin's distribution centre, the defection of Graham Swift back to Picador will give the group pause for thought. Penguin had trumpeted its acquisition of the Booker-winning Swift, but the paperback of The Light of Day became a casualty of the crisis. Swift decided the right thing to do was to return, with his new novel Tomorrow, to a Picador "revitalised under Andrew Kidd" - formerly of Penguin.

*Just 30 minutes separated the announcements this week that Random House had completed buying BBC Books, and that Ravi Mirchandani, publishing director of its Heinemann list, will leave at the end of September. Did the chief executive Gail Rebuck, like Government spinners on September 11, think it a good time to bury bad news? Mirchandani is a publisher to his fingertips, who works with authors to get the best from them. His recent successes have included Rachel Seiffert, Michel Houellebecq and Tony Judt's Postwar. His exit comes hard on the heels of Sue Freestone's departure from Random's Hutchinson for Quercus.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in