Announcements

African Writers Series—The following clarification was received from Nigel Kelly:

There appears to be some confusion circulating about our current plans for the Heinemann African Writers Series. I would like to clarify the latest situation.

The titles published in recent years have not sold as well as we had hoped. As a result of this, a decision was taken last November not to pursue new titles for the series at the present time, but instead to focus our attention during 2003 on promotion of the backlist titles. By doing this we hope to increase sales of the recently published titles and the older backlist titles. This should benefit our existing authors by giving the titles already published more impetus.

It has also been brought to our attention that there are rumors circulating that we have sold part of the backlist to Penguin. This is not the case. We have not sold any of the backlist to anyone and have no intention of doing so. We have, however, successfully licensed 15 titles in the series to Penguin for inclusion in their excellent Modern Classics series, for sales in the UK and Europe. This licensing arrangement will give these titles much greater penetration into High Street bookshops. We will continue to sell the 15 titles concerned into educational institutions as part of our core educational business.

In the meantime, our operations in Africa which focus on educational publishing are going from strength to strength, and we are now publishing more titles by African authors than ever before.

I do hope that this helps to clarify the latest situation with the series.

Nigel Kelly
Publishing Director
International Division
Harcourt Education Ltd.

 

Correction: Gil Zehava Hochberg, whose article "Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Geneologies in Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle" appeared in RAL 34.2: 1-12, is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA, not Berkeley. RAL regrets the misidentification.