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Maia Press Interview


Writewords talks to Jane Havell and Maggie Hamand, publishers, who run the Maia Press.

What’s your background? Can you give us a biog of the Maia Press and where you are now?

Maia Press was founded by Jane Havell and Maggie Hamand. Both have a long track record in publishing. Both of us have worked as editors and Jane is an award-winning book designer, while Maggie is an award-winning novelist and creative writing tutor. We are launching our first three titles on 19 June 2003 and are very excited about them.

Who are you publishing at the moment and why did they stand out?

Our first three titles are all by established writers. Sara Maitland’s On Becoming a Fairy Godmother is a terrific collection of short stories drawing on myth and fable as inspiration. Henrietta Seredy’s novel Leaving Imprints is an electrifying tale of hurt and passion. And Anne Redmon’s novel In Denial is a wonderful, big, complex novel about a complex and disturbing theme. In all three books it was the quality of the writing that was paramount. In the autumn, we are publishing a London Arts sponsored anthology of new writing by authors from many different backgrounds, a prize-winning novel from the 1920s, long out of print, and a beautiful rite-of-passage novel set in India.

Who are your favourite writers/books and why?

Maggie: I just adore the big 19th century novelists, especially the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. My favourite English novelists are Jane Austen, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene. I also love Joseph Conrad. I love their books because I can read and re-read them, over and over, and they get better and better each time.

Jane: I love acutely observed social ‘comedies of manners’, such as Austen, Burney, Edgeworth and Trollope; the great nineteenth-century writers such as (some of) Dickens, (most of ) Eliot and (all of) Henry James; ‘transitional modern’ social interest writers such as H. G. Wells and George Gissing.; in the 20th century, Woolf, Mansfield, Barnes, Stein, Gide – and Colette (who I think is greatly underrated in the UK). More contemporary: Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, Sara Maitland, Helen DeWitt.

What excites you about a piece of writing- what keeps you interested?

Maggie: I read and listen to large quantities of fiction, and for me the sign that it’s working is when I forget that I’m reading or listening, and actually enter the world the writer has created..

Jane: a unique voice and a distinctive literary style.

And what turns you off?

Maggie: When I just can’t work out what on earth is going on, or huge, ungainly slabs of backstory (Jane was 45 and for the last twenty years had worked for Morrisby Associates. She had three children aged blah, blah and blah and had been miserable ever since her husband had left her for the ghastly Sarah three years ago. She had been brought up in Northamptonshire and went to the grammar school where her best friend was Susan, who was now married to a Siberian bookbinder and was thinking of taking up pilates. When she was ten Sarah’s parents had got lost in a forest in East Germany and were thought to have been eaten by wolves, and so on for two more pages!!!)

Jane: absence of a distinctive style!

What do you think are the most common mistakes new writers make?

Putting in too much backstory, using too many adjectives, and spending too much time relating the character’s thoughts rather than having things happening.

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