Hello and welcome to the Long Wave. This week, I had the huge pleasure of an audience with Peepal Tree Press, which has been home to authors such as Bernardine Evaristo and Roger Robinson. Peepal Tree publishes books from the Caribbean and its diaspora, and has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. I spoke to its founder, Jeremy Poynting, and fiction editor Jacob Ross, and what ensued was a masterclass not only in publishing, but in diasporic art.

A passion that became a publisher

Peepal Tree is a rare story of an independent publisher that has not only survived and thrived, but stayed close to its roots. Literally. It is still based in the same house in Leeds where it was launched in 1985. Peepal Tree began, Poynting says, as “an expensive hobby”. Poynting had just completed a PhD on Caribbean writing, and in the course of his travels and research, met people who had books that they couldn’t get published. “I thought there was a niche there,” he says. There was no publishing industry in the Caribbean to speak of, and in the UK, large publishing houses were not interested in Black diaspora books that were not selling at commercial volumes.

In the Caribbean itself, distribution was such a problem that it deterred publishing. “The region had such poor interconnections. You had to deal individually with every bookseller,” and writing about the Caribbean was “not much valued in the region”. In bookshops, there would be a “tiny section” for the genre.

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Pain and printing

But Peepal Tree persevered. How did it go from a hobby to a going concern? “With pain,” Poynting says, laughing. To cut costs, he bought a printing press and set it up in the garage where they printed the first 12 books. “For 12 years we did everything,” he says; typeset, printed, folded, bound, and made books on the premises.

Then Peepal Tree received an Arts Council grant, which, in addition to Poynting remortgaging the house, set the publisher on the path to viability. “It was very painful in the beginning, but what it enabled us to do was to punch over our weight. It got us off the ground. We realised that our backlist was generating significant amounts of money every year.”

In the Caribbean, growth of demand and availability of their published works was “uneven” and “accidental”, he says. For example, he recollects, there were at one point “two really good shops in Guyana, and then the owner of one got a US green card, and that was it”. Half the book supply in the country disappeared overnight. Trinidad remains the strongest market due to having a substantial middle class, good bookshops, and a large literary festival in Bocas Lit Fest.

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A star-studded lineup of authors

Peepal Tree’s first writers in the 1980s were “recently arrived”, Poynting says. Not Windrush generation, but those who had come to the UK after the first wave of Caribbean movement to Britain, and were writing about the region, but from a British base. Peepal Tree published Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo’s first work in the early 90s. And has gone on to publish such writers as Emily Zobel Marshall, Dorothea Smartt and Roger Robinson, who won the TS Eliot prize.

Ross tells me that The Mermaid of Black Conch, written by Monique Roffey, and which won the Costa prize, had 12 or 13 rejections before Peepal Tree published it. This is where Peepal Tree distinguishes itself, he says, by being close enough to the subject matter to see its appeal in a way that more mainstream publishers cannot. The book was “set in the Caribbean, on issues that are quite particular to the colonial and postcolonial experience, it was a fable”, the sort that Peepal Tree grasped.

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Incubation of talent

Peepal Tree uniquely still develops writers, rather than looking for the finished product. Kevin Jared Hosein, “who is massive now”, Ross says, was one of those writers that Peepal Tree worked with for “sometimes over a year. You want to see how they evolve and you are prepared to facilitate that evolution.” Robinson was another writer incubated within Peepal who “went on to become one of the most well-known poets on the contemporary Black British scene”.

Remarkably, Peepal Tree runs a straight submissions process, sifting through a huge number of manuscripts and finding diamonds in the rough. They now publish writers from all Black British backgrounds.

I was curious about what Peepal Tree made of the expansion of appetite among mainstream publishers for Black writers since Black Lives Matter. The answer was a fascinating and nuanced view on how Black writing can become compromised by the wrong gatekeepers: “We had an opening of the doors,” Ross says, “but this door has a spring, and it closes back almost automatically. What you’re now noticing, five years later, is a closing of that gap.” What was picked up, he says, was a “particular kind of Black writing that focused on trauma, that conforms to conventional classic English ideas of what writing is and what a novel is”, one that “doesn’t embrace the cultural elements or the tradition” the writers are from.

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Interrogation and the possibilities of Black writing

“I don’t want to be too condemnatory,” Ross says. It should be fine to be so, I say to Ross, since one of the drawbacks of having a small space in the publishing scene is that sense of embattlement and therefore reluctance to constructively critique.

“There’s a deeper issue here,” he responds. “The idea of a novel is not interrogated enough. Novel means new. And what we have lost, or what we risk losing, is the kind of malleability and flexibility that the novel as a piece of fictional architecture offers us. You don’t challenge the form itself. And I think there are enormous possibilities. I think that the writers coming from our cultural spaces and demographic need to think a little bit more about not just what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. What cultural or narrative resources they can draw on from their own cultural space.”

That is a thought, delivered with passion, that I think applies to all forms of writing, not just fiction. It rang loudly in my head as I left our conversation, and I felt briefly mentored, with a window into that transformative Peepal Tree treatment.

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