There are two internationally important events each year in the publishing calendar: the Frankfurt Book Fair in the autumn and the London Book Fair in the spring. There are others but they’re also-rans: these are the two that matter most, with London exclusively business focused and Frankfurt ever more interested in welcoming the public—and children. 

The difference is marked by the fact that you can buy books at Frankfurt; no one can buy anything at London except rights and coffee. That makes London more efficient, it is said: there aren’t any distractions. 

Both fairs hold speaking events through the day. Industry experts talk about the past (their experience) or the future (changing trends). And usually, the fairs put a country in the spotlight. In the last three years, Frankfurt has featured the Philippines (2025—I don’t think my hearing has recovered yet from the evening of traditional drumming), Italy (2024—nice wine) and Slovenia (2023—meh). London’s national focus has been on hold since 2024; previously the honorees were Ukraine (2023) and Sharjah (2022).

London also recognises individuals. Its Trailblazer Awards celebrate emerging leaders with less than ten years’ experience while its Lifetime Achievement Award honours long-serving titans: founders of independent presses, senior editors, major agents.

This year’s Lifetime award-winner was announced to a small gathering of colleagues and friends after the fair had finished for the day on Wednesday evening. Warm and loud applause greeted the recipient when he stepped up to a lectern, and then again after he had spoken for five minutes and stepped down.

I knew nothing about him, and had to look him up when I got home. It appears that he had left Penguin Books in the mid-1990s to set up his own company and has been described by a fellow professional as “the very epitome of the independent publisher: fearless, frank, feisty and totally committed to his authors and his company.”

His bestsellers have included Alan Bennett, Mary Beard and Francis Fukuyama, as well as Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which has sold more than three million copies worldwide. In 2007 he bought the firm behind Lionel Shriver’s 2003 success We Need to Talk about Kevin, which has sold over 900,000 copies. 

His manner, as he rustled the pages of the script he was reading from, was likeable and engaging—perhaps even a little self-deprecating, in that English, bookish way. Whatever the mix, it has clearly worked for him.

Given his background and what he was being celebrated for, I was curious to know what he would want to say. I missed the very start but there seemed to be three main points. 

Noting that he had attended 37 London Book Fairs at its current site, he regretted that the publishing trade was tough and getting tougher, with non-fiction sales dropping four percent in the last year. Second, he wanted to put on record that he deplored Amazon for its market dominance and because it pays less tax than his company, which has 62 employees, while grudgingly admitting that it did a good job for book buyers.

Then came something unexpected and anomalous. He had grown up, he said, in a conventional Jewish background (he stumbled slightly, saying this) and had been a Zionist (unwittingly, I think he meant). In later life he published a Palestinian writer, became close friends with him, and is a Zionist no longer, something he said that had put a strain on some of his friendships.

Under his stewardship, the Palestinian—Raja Shehadeh—has emerged as a much acclaimed figure, with his Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape winning the Orwell Prize in 2008. More recently Shehadeh brought out We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2022) about his complex relationship with his father, and What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (2024) which argues that Israel has one-sidedly opposed peace and reconciliation since its founding.

All of this could have been said without contention. He could have brought in other books and authors that he had fostered in his thirty years since founding the company. But, unless I misheard, he named no one else. We were left to understand that, of all the things that this Lifetime Achievement Award-winner wanted us to know about him, it was he wasn’t, or wasn’t any longer, a Zionist.

For someone whose speciality is words, the crudeness of that formulation was striking: the effect was almost the equivalent of saying “I used to be a Jew, was therefore a Zionist, and therefore bad. I befriended a Palestinian, I’m no longer a Zionist, and am therefore good.” 

Why is that crude? Because identities, political positions and friendships are all complex, as Shehadeh went to great lengths to show in talking about himself and his father. Had the speaker learned nothing from his Palestinian mentor? Apparently not, for his view of himself reflected binarism: one position (contemptible) to be revoked, its opposite (virtuous) to be embraced. In a room full of people committed to nuance, this wasn’t just disappointing: it was astonishing. Where was the enlightenment that we were there to praise? Where was the self-awareness?

Worse still, the message seemed structured to elicit approval: the repentant sinner, now redeemed on account of his triumphalist disavowal—once blind, now sighted. To the observer—to this observer at least—it looked like modish virtue-signalling of a type that this expert in the communications arts ought to have been too sophisticated for, a playing to the gallery. Of all the things he could have stressed, the one thing he chose was that he had shed the skin of the Zionism into which he had been born. That, and that alone, he delivered as defining his credentials.

Had I been quicker-witted, and braver, and more articulate, I might have heckled but I didn’t want heads to turn and become the focus of attention—and hatred. It was, in any case, his evening. On the other hand, I didn’t want his remarks to pass without some expression of protest—and so, after his speech was over and his friends were gathering round to congratulate him, I went up to him. 

I shall spend the next days, and weeks, and possibly months, fussing about what I should have said to him, had I been able to conquer my emotion. “We’re here to celebrate your professionalism, not your grandstanding.” Or “you’ve reduced a lifetime of literary achievement to a political slogan.” Or “if the point of literature is its communitarianism, you’ve just made the case for division.”

What I actually said to him was that he was a disgrace. It wasn’t my finest hour, and what I said was confrontational. But it seemed to me self evident that he was a disgrace, for obvious reasons, and that such a simple declarative confirmation of the fact was all that was needed. 

Apparently it wasn’t. After getting me to repeat it, perhaps because he hadn’t heard me right or couldn’t believe what I’d said, he asked me, with a schoolboyish grin, whether I meant his remarks on Amazon. There, at least, there seemed a possibility of engagement. Not so when I made clear that I was talking about his focusing on his repudiation of Israel.

How did he reply—this grandee of the publishing industry, this promoter of language and literacy, this exponent of the use of words to reach out and build consensus?

This time there was no schoolboyish grin. He said, “Oh fuck off.” Then again: “Oh fuck off.” And a third time. Blunt as a cudgel. Suddenly, or so it seemed, the sum total of political discourse had been reduced to a swear word. Then, after reaching for my lanyard to see who I was, he told me to get out—and swore once again when I dared him to. No reaching out there. Had I called him out on bad-mouthing Amazon, that would have been acceptable, but to call him out on being divisive, on promoting polarisation on this one special topic, didn’t warrant anything but a foul-mouthed expletive. Three times—and then once more.

As I left, someone told me that what had been said was inappropriate and I agreed, as if she had had the esteemed honouree’s words in mind, rather than mine. And then, as I walked the long walk to the fair’s exit, one of the guests walked past me quickly and photographed me. I wonder where that photo will appear and how it will be used.

Looking back, of course I let myself down: in the heat of the moment, I didn’t have the control, or judgement, to say anything helpful. That said, I was shocked that he went one further and swore—three times, and then a fourth time. Not so self-deprecating then.

I’ve recounted this event without naming the character—although he can easily be identified from the mass of other details—because I don’t want this complaint to be about him. It’s about a situation in which someone at the very apex of their career, and on the verge of retirement, feels so insecure about himself that he thinks it proper to sum up his identity in the language of a Palestinian street protest—language that approaches that of apartheid: Jews not welcome here—to an audience he calculated was eager for such a gesture or ought to have been.

That, I fear, is the state of tribal conflict we are reduced to when those in whom we invest our trust use language not to bring us together but to divide and then to silence us. 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)