An Interview with Ellah Allfrey
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After an overnight flight from Houston, TX, to London, UK, I met Ellah Allfrey for the first time on the afternoon of my arrival, April 12, 2013, an appointment my staff had arranged for me. I had a cordial meeting with her for over an hour—a conversation which led me to ask her for a recorded interview for publication. She agreed to do so—but via email, which was understandable considering how busy she must be conducting a major part of the business of Granta, a global literary and cultural journal. What follows is the brief interview we created via email.
Did your background in journalistic writing help to prepare you for your career in editing and publishing? I know of quite a few US American novelists who moved from journalistic writing to fiction writing, and yet in the United States we are taught to think of journalistic writing as a form very different from creative prose writing. What led you to literary editing and publishing?
Although my first degree is in Communications: Journalism, I went on to do a master’s in Organizational and Interpersonal Communications at the School of Information and Communication Studies at Rutgers. I never worked as a journalist beyond editing the Goshen student magazine in my senior year. Soon after I finished my master’s, my husband and I moved to England (where he is from). At the time, I thought I wanted to be a management consultant, but found that my particular combination of American education didn’t make sense in that profession here in England. So I worked in educational administration and training and then business management. I failed to thrive—spectacularly. I came to publishing after my husband and daughter asked me to quit a job that was making me especially miserable and cobbled together a short career as a sub-editor before my husband pushed me to try out publishing. I will be forever grateful for that. His logic, which turned out to be entirely sound, was that someone who spent all her spare time, and a considerable amount of her money, on books, needed to find a way to make a career making them. And so I did.
That’s a long answer. In fact, I do think my training in journalism, but more particularly in communications helped. I knew what made a good story, had a natural aptitude for editing that my teachers had recognized and helped hone and, at a graduate level, I think studying systems analysis enabled me to be a good editor of nonfiction. I was taught how to look at any project as a whole, to see how it functioned, what its key components were, and to figure out a way to make it function better. That kind of analysis is crucial for any editor. You have to be able to see what a story is before you can make it better.
In the United States, there is—has always been—a very small number of African Americans in the publishing industry, especially in literary and cultural editing and publishing. [End Page 753] Is this also the case in the United Kingdom? That is, has the publishing industry in the UK attracted many people of African descent? How do you account for that?
I’m afraid it is very much the case in the UK. My guess is that one can probably count the number of black editors on the fingers on one hand. And perhaps that hand would belong to a butcher who had lost several digits to his trade. The number increases only marginally if we are counting all people of color. It’s a dire situation to my mind. There have been several initiatives over the years I’ve been in the industry that have attempted to retain the few black graduates who enter the profession. And despite valiant attempts at mentoring and funding from the Arts Council and other organizations, including a few initiatives by publishing houses themselves, the retention rate is not good. It’s difficult being in an industry where one sees few senior figures who...
