Interview: Sharmaine Lovegrove

“I dedicate my life to the story”, says Sharmaine Lovegrove, the visionary head of transformative new publishing imprint, Dialogue Books, who has recently been named FutureBook Person of the Year by The Bookseller magazine.

Based in London, Dialogue is part of the world’s second largest publishing group, Hachette, and was specifically set up ‘to shine a spotlight on stories for, about and by readers from the LGBTQI+, disability, working class and BAME communities.’ In other words, writers and readers overlooked and under-represented in the publishing world.

Sharmaine was born and grew up in London. She left home at a young age, and had spells sleeping rough and being homeless. She worked in bookshops as a teenager and at 17 she was selling books under Waterloo Bridge, buying the stock from house clearances. She has, also, spent time in Germany running an English language bookshop in Berlin, before returning to London to, amongst other things, set up a scouting agency, and undertake a stint as Literary Editor at Elle UK before turning to publishing.

She says: “People say to me you’ve done so many things but I’ve only ever done one thing but in different contexts. I’ve only ever connected the author to the reader, that’s what I do.”

Dialogue Books’ authors, Amer Anwar, Lucy Ayrton and Angela Chadwick, are at Waterstones Bristol Galleries on November 23

As someone who is, in her own words, “always open to stories”, she happily acknowledges the plot twist in her own tale which sees her now running a publishing imprint which is part of a huge global group, in an office which looks out on the scene of her early bookselling exploits 20 years ago, Waterloo Bridge.

She moved to Bristol earlier this year, commuting to the capital for part of the week. On what she thinks of her new home city, Sharmaine says she loves its “independent spirit…Bristol is its own place. It’s not looking towards London, Manchester or anywhere else.”

She recognises the strength of the literature scene in the city but is certain about what she thinks is missing: “There’s a huge appetite for storytelling in the city, but there’s a lot of work to do. There doesn’t seem to be a dedicated place for literature. Bristol Festival of Ideas is an incredible festival but they don’t have one space. It doesn’t seem obvious to me where that one environment is to go and see book events. I feel like that’s the thing that’s missing.”

And her 20 years’ experience of all aspects of the book world have given her great insight into what and where change is needed in the industry as a whole.

On the relationship between publishing houses and booksellers, for instance, she says: “We have a strong tradition of bookselling in this country, it’s such a shame to see that not respected and recognised as publishers are growing and becoming bigger. It’s really odd to me that the humble bookseller is largely ignored from the process. That’s because I come from a bookselling background and most people who work in publishing don’t. When I opened my bookshop in Berlin I made it absolutely my goal to connect with editors and publicists.”

The biggest issue she thinks the industry faces, however, is that “we’ve already decided what a writer looks like, what an editor looks like. The irony is that when you meet writers, especially those that have two or three books they all look really different.”

She adds: “We almost have a phobia about meeting people that tell you they’ve written a book because we only seem to like to have the book from an agent and from an approved source. There’s this idea that because someone’s talking to you about their book it means they’re not a writer; it’s a very odd thing. It’s a symptom of being in ivory towers and publishing being very data and process driven. It’s not an encouraging place for people to go and gravitate towards storytellers.

“We’re (publishers) always saying what does ‘good’ or ‘best’ look like in practice but not in terms of people, just in terms of the work. I always say ‘best’ looks like having no preconceptions around what makes a great author other than her ability to tell a great story and our job is to be able to see something that’s quite raw. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, it’s just that it tends to happen within authorised gatekeepers.”

She has a deep interest in politics and debate, and this underpins much of what she has achieved, as well as her plans for the future: “I grew up with political, socialist bookshops in south London and my uncle, Len Garrison who founded the Black Cultural Archives, would take me to a bookshop in Brixton. It was all about these spaces to have discussion and dialogue and where people got angry. I grew up in that anger of ‘80s and ‘90s London where I was a child but I just remember being in these bookshops, these spaces where people were having arguments and discussions, talking about the world and then they would take books off the shelves and say ‘look in this, it says this’ and ideas were shared.”

And this leads on to what she thinks is the essence of Dialogue Books, the groundbreaking imprint she has set up.

“All of my books, whether they’re commercial or literary, fiction or non-fiction are saying something about our society, and that is to me what a Dialogue Book is. A book that tells you something about the people who live in our society who are on a journey against the status quo.”

She continues: “I’ve always seen books as…the reward for taking the time to take in information so that you’re coherently forming your own ideas and opinion and that formation of opinion is what allows us to grow as people, to be as Aristotle says ‘political animals’. The fact that that’s not heralded in the industry any more is bizarre. How and why did that happen and would we have the society we’re living in today if books that are more ideas-based, fiction or non-fiction, if they were given more of a space? Would we be so polarised?”

And the person who is perhaps doing more than any other to haul the publishing industry into the 21st century has a very clear approach to finding the authors and stories to publish: “it can come from anywhere.”

Sharmaine Lovegrove will be in discussion with three of her Dialogue Books’ authors, Amer Anwar, Lucy Ayrton and Angela Chadwick, at Waterstones Bristol Galleries on November 23 at 7pm. For more information, visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk/events/dialogue-books-launch-night/

Read more: Bristol writer, Nikesh Shukla, sets up agency for marginalised writers

Main photo credit: Barbara Evripidou

Grid photo credit: Suki Dhanda