Books are my business: New Island commissioning editor Aoife Walsh

Aoife Walsh's first job was in Four Courts Press: 'That’s how I learned the hard skills.'

Aoife Walsh is a commissioning editor with New Island. From Co Limerick, she now lives in Dublin.

How did you get into publishing?

I did English and philosophy [in UCC] and I spent a year in Paris thinking that I wanted to get into Arts administration. 

I came back to Dublin and did an MA in medieval literature, language and culture, and I focused on theatre … but that dream died a death. 

Then at a certain point, I thought I would like to work with books or be an editor. 

Full disclosure, I saw the film The Hours, with Meryl Streep, and I loved the scene with all of the manuscripts and the proofs on the chairs, I thought about how they become books and said ‘I want to do that’.

My first job was in Four Courts Press, that’s how I learned the hard skills, at the elbow of Michael Adams who was the publisher there. 

I was there for three years and then I worked with what was then called Ireland Literature Exchange, an Arts organisation promoting literature abroad, for five years. 

After that, I moved to Canada to get in-house trade publishing experience. 

I got an internship with McClelland and Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House and a quintessential Canadian press that had published the work of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro. 

That led to a job as assistant to the publishers, fiction and non-fiction, which I did for just over a year.

Then I came home and worked with O’Brien Press as managing editor and I was with them for just over a year-and-a-half. 

Then this job in New Island came up. It seems like it has all made sense but at the time, you are just gravitating towards what you can do and what’s available because both here and in Canada, the industries are very small.

What does your current role involve?

I’m a commissioning editor but I probably split my time between that and being a managing editor. It’s all hands on deck here to make the books, to get them through. 

So I’m ping-ponging between submissions in my inbox, and meetings with various people. 

The way I commission and acquire is to try to very early on see the book, develop a vision for it, and then think about how we’re going to publish it — and if we should be the ones to publish it. 

That feeds into the editorial management part of it, which is gathering the team, editor, designer, sometimes a publicist, and communicating with them. 

I work closely with our production assistant Cassia to make sure that we that we hit our marks with our books, so that they come out on time. It’s pretty intense.

What do you like most about what you do?

Reading something by someone who just doesn’t know how good it is. I love being the person to tell them. 

And also to be there to help them through the whole process because one of the things that we do very well at New Ireland is publish debut authors.

It’s very exciting, very creative, and very collaborative.

What do you like least about it?

Having to say no because we fully appreciate the work that goes into everything. It’s really hard, there is so much more being written and submitted than ever before.

Three desert island books

It just so happens that two of my three authors have passed away recently. Anything by Alice Munro, who I started reading as a teenager, she just set such a standard. I’d probably start with the early ones and just work my way through them.

Then Jane Austen in honour of my late mum, Ursula, who would reread Jane Austen almost every year. I read Persuasion for the first time last year when she was unwell, and I was able to text her and talk to her about it.

Finally, CJ Sansom, there’s something about that time he writes about, the Tudors and all of that, it is so removed, it is almost like a fantasy. And yet the best writers of those kinds of books give you the reality. I have six more of his books to read so I probably would bring them.

• www.newisland.ie

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