James Currey: Godfather of African publishing
Though now spending a well-earned retirement among the dreaming spires of the English university city of Oxford, British publisher James Currey still keeps up with work in African and Arab studies, fields in which he spent much of his long career.
Not only does Currey still have his own academic imprint in James Currey Publishers, now part of a larger concern, which specialises in work on modern and contemporary Africa, but he has also recently produced a memoir of a career spent introducing Western audiences to African and Arab writers when he was in charge of the African Writers Series and Arab Authors at the British publisher Heinemann.
These two series, managed by Currey from 1967 to 1984, provided the first international exposure for African writers such as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Kenyan playwright and novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o and South African novelist Bessie Head and sponsored the first English translations of works by Arab authors Tayeb Salih and Naguib Mahfouz.