Books are my business: Poet and Dedalus Press editor Pat Boran

Pat Boran's latest poetry collection, 'Hedge School', is out now.

Pat Boran is a writer and editor of the long-standing Irish poetry imprint Dedalus Press. Originally from Portlaoise, he lives in Dublin. 

He has published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose and is a member of Aosdána. His latest poetry collection, Hedge School, is out now.

How did you get into publishing?

It has all been a series of accidents for me. At the moment, I am ‘in publishing’ but before that, I did some radio broadcasting on poetry and literature and I ran the Dublin Writers Festival. 

In the arts, you often can’t predict what you are going to be doing next.

When I was leaving school, I wanted to be in a band, it was the heady years of post-punk so I was busking on and off for a few years and I was writing a little at the same time.

Then I gradually had to accept that music wasn’t my forte but I kept doing the writing and fell into literary company.

I did some volunteering in Poetry Ireland, who used to have a little library in Mount St in Dublin. I’m very technical so I ended up helping with stuff like typesetting the magazine. 

I had published a number of books with Dedalus Press as one of their authors. I was looking for something new to do and with the arrogance of youth, I said I would do the job and the next day I was running Dedalus Press. I was thrown out of the boat and it was sink or swim.

What does your role involve?

There are two of us in Dedalus Press, so it is very much a kitchen-table operation and I like that about it. I have been doing it for 18 years — when I took it over, I thought I would be doing it for three.

It is myself and my partner Raffaela and her background isn’t in literature, which is a really good thing. She worked in banking and finance so she is good on the business end of things. 

I do the editorial end, the typesetting, and the book design, the website, basically all the other stuff. In the main, we try to do everything ourselves and keep it small and personable.

We try to have a good relationship with our authors, and our readers. 

We have regulars who come back for new publications — they trust the press. Small presses survive on word of mouth and reliability. 

Literary publishing is essentially vocational — nobody gets into it who is not already, in some way, obsessed. 

When you look at the literary publishers and editors here, they are almost all themselves writers; if they weren’t also doing this, there would be no literary renaissance on the island.

What do you like most about what you do?

The part I really like is when you open the envelope, or more likely the email, and straight away, you go, ‘wow, what’s this?’. There is no recipe for it. 

The big pleasure of publishing is finding something new and going, ‘God, I want to publish this, how do I go about it?’

What do you like least about what you do?

The paperwork. I understand why it exists but it is incredibly time-consuming.

Three desert island books

The book I have bought more than any other to give to other people is The Notebook by Ágóta Kristof, a Hungarian who lived in exile in Switzerland and wrote in French.

She wrote three novellas, which are published in a single volume called The Book of Lies — The Notebook is the first book. 

It is difficult to describe how good and unusual it is. It is the story of twins in an unnamed country during a war who are shipped off to their grandmother and is told in the first person plural.

The second one would be Germs: A Memoir of Childhood by the eminent British philosopher Richard Wollheim, who died in 2003. There is incredible detail in his recollections. 

My childhood was a million miles from this kind of affluence but I was so enamoured of this book that when I finished reading it, I decided I had to write a memoir of my own, The Invisible Prison, about growing up in Portlaoise during the Troubles.

For the psychic balance, I would have to bring a book of poems as well, which would be anything by Wisława Szymborska, a Polish poet who died in 2012. 

She writes deceptively simple, clear, witty, self-deprecating poems that are full of ideas. She gets to the essence of the big idea but never in a pontificating way.

• www.dedaluspress.com