Deep Vellum has already found success publishing Romanian authors, including Mircea Cărtărescu (Solenoid) and Magda Carneci (Fem), whose novels were longlisted for the International Booker and named a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, respectively. At this year’s London Book Fair, the press is spotlighting Tatiana Țîbuleac—the Moldovan-Romanian author behind The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes (trans. Monica Cure), which Deep Vellum published in January. Now, with the Frankfurt Book Fair having named Romania its 2029 country of honor, the timing seems fortuitous.

Ahead of the event for the book that was held Wednesday at Hatchard’s, PW spoke with Deep Vellum founder and publisher Will Evans and rights director Sarah McEachern about Țîbuleac’s English-language debut, and the blind spots that keep publishers from bringing the world’s best writing, no matter the language, to print.

What drew you to Țîbuleac's book?

Sarah McEachern: When I went to Frankfurt in 2023, I spent a lot of time talking to lots of friends from all over the world, including a lot of Eastern Europeans, because a lot of our list is from there. I had asked which authors Europeans were talking about that hadn't made it yet into English, which is often the last language that books move into, and a lot of people were bringing up Tatiana.

A lot of the reasons that other publishers had passed on it, are reasons that we see books in translation are often passed over, but as soon as soon as they're in front of readers, they want it and read it and relate to it. The book is from an author who is Moldovan, who writes in Romanian, who now lives in France. The characters in it are Polish immigrants who live in London. There’s this idea that what people want from translation is kind of to go on vacation, but that's not true at all. We tell people, this is a book about a young boy, discovering his mother is a real person, of like, the last moment of her life. And it's this really transitional moment of childhood into adulthood, of caring for a parent who's dying. People get that right away. They aren’t asking oh, well, if she speaks Romanian, how can she be from Moldova? They’re very capable and they want these books.

You’ve published a range of Romanian literature. Do those books have anything in common?

Will Evans: The concept of a Romanian literature is not what interests us. Is the concept of literature in its infinitude, though Romanian literature is extraordinary and has a wonderful history. What initially appealed to me about this part of the world was Russian literature—it changed my life as a kid growing up in a small town in the South. But it's not like if you read Dostoyevsky, you’re doing it to travel to St. Petersburg. Translated literature is about the idea that a Romanian writer can write about any part of the world or any part of psyche with the same quality and depth as a writer from the American tradition. It's very important to us to elevate it in its uniqueness, inside of the context it comes from, and then to bring it into English outside of that context.

SM: If you look at the Romanian translation on our list, those books are all really different from each other. That's always really important for us. There is no one book that it defines what Romanian literature is. There are like five, and they all are very different types of books that expand your imagination in new ways. These books are all portals into a different type of literary tradition that are constantly pushing back on your assumptions of what literature can be.

All literature is political, but translation can be more overtly political than other formats. How do you think about the political dimensions of your work?

WE: Translation is the act that makes communicating between any two individuals possible, and literary translation is what enables an entire culture to come into these conversations. When we publish books in translation, we're able to the way that other people process reality, the act of storytelling in all its unique forms. The empathy building that's possible through literature is so unique.

SM: A lot of what Deep Vellum publishes people often see as “difficult” books. We like to publish difficult books, but what difficult means something very different for every single book,

We’re publishing a trilingual book next year in an endangered language, Spanish, and English. That's difficult for a lot of publishers— because there's sometimes not a lot of grant funding for smaller languages, or because the countries they come from have been oppressed—but it's not difficult to read and it's not difficult to find: you find more readers when you publish trilingually.

But sometimes, if you start poking these things that are difficult a little bit, you realize that they’re actually constructed difficulties. This month we’re publishing Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi, translated by Michelle Quay, which was originally published in Persian. A lot of Iranian writers don't receive advances for their books, because you can't send money into Iran and, even if they're in exile, all books published in Iran are public domain. But we found out that the first time his book was published in Persian, it was published in a diaspora Persian language bookstore in L.A., so it was actually under copyright law. It was first published 20 years ago but hadn’t been brought into English because of the political reasons around the Persian language—which turned out to actually not apply to this book whatsoever.

A lot of publishers sometimes aren't as brave as the writers out there, so we try to be as brave as the readers and writers that are already in our ecosystem. We just need to match that—that's the job of a publisher.