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Strong and Parker form new Scotland-based independent publisher Selkies House
Rebecca Strong and Pene Parker have founded Selkies House, a new independent, employee-owned publishing house based in the Scottish Highlands.
Publisher and co-founder Strong most recently helped launch Mountain Leopard Press, which became part of Welbeck in 2021.
Beginning her career at Harvill and Bloomsbury, she previously worked as an independent agent in the US and as the rights director and senior editor at the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, New York.
Pene Parker, creative founder, is formerly the creative director of BBC Worldwide and of Octopus.
Of the publishing house the founders said: “Selkies House is founded and led by women. Applying creative and technological innovation to all aspects of publishing, design lies at the core of everything we do. Addressing the pressing needs of the era—the environment, migration, freedom of expression—the care we put into the way our books look and the way they can be sustainably produced are as important to us as the value we place on the ways in which we work with each other. We hire to empower, acquire to challenge and delight, and co-operate across sectors to print, market, and sell.The ambition is simple: Read a book. Change the world.”
The Selkies House advisory board includes Susie Dunlop, publisher of Allison & Busby, and Colin Adams, formerly group chief financial officer of Bloomsbury and chief operating officer of Quercus. Across six imprints, the goal is to grow to approximately 60 books a year, with a marketing budget attributed to each. Strong says more information will be announced regarding a distribution contract "when finally signed", and likewise sales "in the next weeks."
The trade fiction and non-fiction lists will aim to “champion writers who have otherwise been underrepresented for reasons to do with gender, politics, or geography", while the illustrated lifestyle list will explore radical beauty in its various expressions.
A Gaelic literature list will celebrate “the renaissance of a culture ascending”, while the literature in translation list “brings award-winning authors and translators from around the world to English-language readers for the first time”. An academic list will draw from the latest research in ocean and earth sciences and “bring vernacular traditions within the built environment to new generations of students and professionals”.
Selkies House’s first publication will be Black Land, the memoir of activist and poet Abduweli Ayup, whose dedication to the language and literature of his Uyghur homeland resulted in his arrest and torture. The publisher says: “From a long line of cultural guardians, whose family ran an independent bookshop in the Silk Road city of Kashgar, in exile Ayup continues to teach the language of resistance and investigate the stories of the Uyghur diaspora through his journalism. Raffi Khatchadourian of the New Yorker has written the introduction.” Other forthcoming books include Alejandra Banca’s From Savagery and Galo Ghigliotto’s The Museum of Fog, translated by Thomas Bunstead.
Strong said: “Scotland has a proud history of independent, literary publishing. The country’s academic rigour and engineering excellence is revered the world over. With its headquarters in the Highlands, Selkies House looks forward to working with local creative, academic, and audio engineering professionals who might traditionally have been excluded from a career in publishing, and to celebrating the inclusive cultural values of Scotland into the 21st century.”
