Voor het tweetalige (online) magazine ‘de Moanne’ interviewde ik de Oekraïnse uitgever Liliia Omelianenko over haar vak dat ze nu uitvoert vanuit haar tijdelijk onderkomen in Bratislava, in buurland Slowakije.
What can you do as a publisher?
‘Our army is 40 million Ukrainian people; we are strong; everyone is doing something to fight the Russian terrorists. I’m happy and surprised that I’m able to do something as well. Because from the very beginning I was not sure how I, as a publisher, can help. I experience a huge amount of support from my colleagues all over Europe. Saara Tiuraniemi from Tammi, a great publishing house in Finland, has become my personal hero. She bought the rights of one of our children’s books called Maya and her moms written by Larysa Denysenko (1973) and illustrated by Masha Foya, and started the whole campaign of promoting this book in Europe. So now the rights are sold to Sweden (Bonnier Carlsen), UK (Bonnier Books UK), Poland (Wydawnictwo Kropka), Germany (Rowohlt) and Estonia (Koolibri).
In most of the countries all proceeds from the sales of the books will go to Ukrainian children, in particular, via UNICEF. They have also found a printing house that will print everything for free. Tammi made it number 1 in the bestseller lists right away!
We cannot sell books right now for obvious reasons, but this is the way to actually help. Really amazing, I could not imagine that our publishing house could do something like this during the war.’
Lees het hele artikel op ‘de Moanne’ achter deze link.
Lilia Omelianenko