Seagull Books

Seagull Books is a publishing venture begun in Kolkata in 1982 by Naveen Kishore, a theater practitioner. It began primarily as a response to the growing need for an Indian publishing house for theater and the other arts and since then it has expanded its operations to include translations of world literature as well as twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical theory and non-fiction. At present, the company has registered divisions in London and New York City alongside its initial establishment in Kolkata.

Beginning with the series New Indian Playwrights which translated the work of regional Indian playwrights into English, the project grew to accommodate film scripts, especially post-production film scripts. The function of English in India as a link language made it possible for plays composed in the regional languages to be brought onto the same platform and thereby widening the scope of national theater.The series attempted to enhance important play scripts with additional material to provide the interested student, scholar, theater person and reader with more complete access to the script. Theater, the cinema, theoretical writings on the cinema and art made up the initial catalogue of Seagull Books and since its inception, its focus has always laid in the direction of what might be termed as 'the human condition'. Today, Seagull Books is widely considered one of the world’s most respected publisher of literature in English translation. It publishes over 50 books a year, almost 80 per cent of which are translations from various languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Bengali, Norwegian, Dutch, Turkish and Hungarian, among others. Seagull’s titles are celebrated for their exquisite covers, designed by senior editor and graphic designer Sunandini Banerjee, and extraordinary production values. Seagull’s authors include some of the most revered names in twentieth- and twenty-first-century world literature, from Nobel Laureates Jean-Paul Sartre, Imre Kertesz, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller and Mo Yan to Jorge Luis Borges, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, René Char, Max Frisch, Frienrich Dürrenmatt, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Urs Widmer, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Alexander Kluge, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Cees Nooteboom, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Maryse Condé, Mahasweta Devi, Pascal Quignard, Hélène Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, Antjie Krog, William Kentridge, Tomas Espedal, Wolfgang Hilbig, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Ghassan Zaqtan, Alawiya Sobh, and Man Booker International Prize winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Contemporary English-language authors published by Seagull include Zakes Mda, Toby Litt, Tariq Ali, Dan Gunn and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Seagull is committed to publishing young contemporary authors; emerging European authors brought to the international arena by Seagull’s translations include Dorothee Elmiger, Jan Brandt, Gunther Geltinger, Thomas Lehr, Florence Noiville, Lola Lafon, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Monica Cantieni, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Tilman Rammstedt and Abbas Khider, among others. Seagull has been publishing specifically dedicated series of translations under the French List, German List, Swiss List, Norwegian List, Italian List, Hungarian List and, most recently, Arab List and India List; it boasts a backlist of nearly 400 titles, many of which have been widely and very positively reviewed in the international press. Seagull is currently developing two eclectic and important series—Elsewhere Texts (edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, a list that focuses on non-European leftist scholarship) and Pride List (which brings forth queer writing from around the world).

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