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Irish Examiner
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Books are my business: Tramp Press founders Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen
Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen are founders of Tramp Press, an independent Irish publisher which was established in 2014. Authors it has published include Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Mona Eltahawy, Sara Baume and Mike McCormack. Tramp Press authors have won many accolades, including the International Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Rooney Prize. How did you get into publishing? Sarah: I was quite a sickly kid, and I missed a lot of school, so I read a lot. But it never occurred to me that working in books could be an actual job. I did a liberal arts degree in the US, in a college in Santa Fe. I was hired as a writing assistant there and then I could see how this might work as a career. I went on to Oxford Brookes University for a masters in publishing and then I worked for Dalkey Archive and briefly for Continuum, a non-fiction publisher based in New York. I met Lisa when I was covering someone's maternity leave in a Dublin publisher, and we started talking about trying things in a different way. All around us, we saw publishers throwing a lot of books against the wall and hoping that something would stick. We were wondering if we could just find those few books that may or may not be supported by the market. We weren't overly concerned with the perceived commercialism of the books that we were reading. We just wanted quality, quality, quality. It is part of the reason we publish so little, between two and four books a year. Lisa: I did my undergrad in Galway, and then I worked in magazines in Dublin for a while. I was going to work in publishing or academia, as I was really interested in research. I did a PhD on Irish theatre, and it was clear to me that academia wasn't something I was suited to at all. I wrapped my PhD up and then started an internship where I met Sarah, she was in the role temporarily and I thought that soon we'd both be out there competing for the very few jobs there were in publishing. It was dismaying because she is so impressive — she was telling everybody to read Donal Ryan way before his first book was published. We were talking about what we would do if we were publishers. At the time, literary fiction was left on the table a little. We started the company in a moment where there was a lot of contraction in publishing, a lot of anxiety and conservatism. I was really interested in people taking risks and setting the agenda themselves. It all kicked off from there. What does your role involve? Lisa: We're very lucky how complementary our work styles are. From the early days, we were competitively doing as much as we could, but now we both have small kids. We're able to give each other grace when that gets tricky. There's a lot of understanding around getting projects over the line together, as opposed to demonstrating presenteeism or being seen to go to meetings or whatever. We both do operational things, the admin that comes from just running a company. When it comes to editorial, I have traditionally taken the lead. When it comes to production and marketing campaigns, Sarah takes the lead. She is very thorough, energetic, and passionate — there is nobody who talks about books with such passion. I tend to take the lead on the social media stuff, so if we get cancelled, it will be my fault. Sarah: To some extent, I do take the lead on publicity, but a lot of the time that is just putting Lisa in front of a book buyer and letting her talk about a book, because it is very hard for them to say no to her, she's the Babe Ruth of pitches. It's very useful for us to be both across everything, we're small and we plan to remain small. It's just ourselves, our part-time administrator, Siobhán, who is amazing, and a team of exceptional freelancers. I love that, for the most part, we have very similar tastes and we get excited about the same things. What do you like most about what you do? Sarah: That sense of discovery is amazing. I'm usually the one who reads incoming subs, and there's a sense of possibility when you're opening up something, and you read the first couple of pages and you think: 'Oh, this is good'. There is no better feeling in the world. Lisa: It's really interesting when somebody allows you to see their creative process, it's very intimate and trusting. The writer does all the work, they have all the responsibility, it's their name on the cover, but getting to help them with the mechanics of that, I feel like that novelty will never wear off. It's such a privilege. To hear what somebody's trying to do and to help them get there, it's so exciting and energising. It really fills your soul up. What do you like least? Sarah: I don't like the responsibility sometimes, because no publisher, unfortunately, really knows what's going to happen when rubber meets the road. So you can have an extraordinary publicity campaign, exceptional reviews, and still the book won't sell, and that's devastating. Unfortunately, it happens fairly often, because this is publishing, and this is what the business looks like. But when you've worked so hard, when you're such a fan of the author, and when you know they deserve better, it's really hard to see. Lisa: I hate how sales have to be tied to a sense of accomplishment. I think the accomplishment is that Sarah found a book in the slush pile, or that we recognise a talent and we have brought it to market. That readers can get that either in their bookshop or in a library is a huge achievement. Three desert island books Sarah: Problems by Jade Sharma is a book we brought out some years ago, the voice is extraordinary and the ballsiness of it, it's great stuff. Persuasion by Jane Austen, which I'm rereading again. I just love it. I'm near the end now, and it's very tense — is Captain Wentworth going to come to Anne's father's house or not? I would also pick The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, which is the first part of the Broken Earth series; it's not one for new mothers or new parents. It's really heartbreaking, but it's so beautiful. The greatest thing a book can do is open up your mind to different ways of thinking about things, and it does that across the board. Lisa: Because I'm fairly recently post-partum, Making Babies by Anne Enright, which is one of the finest pieces of writing on one of the most mundane and extraordinary experiences a person can go through. The Children of the Famine series by Marita Conlon McKenna; O'Brien Press recently brought out a beautiful green hardback special edition in a collaboration with Kenny's of Galway. For a lot of us, reading Under the Hawthorn Tree in primary school was a really formative moment. My third pick is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. I absolutely don't have a favourite Tramp Press book, I'm not allowed to, but that book is an extraordinary moment in Irish literature. It really speaks to what we wanted when we were setting up the company, which is that the books you publish should matter. I think Solar Bones is the first line of our obituary.
Gulf Today
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Brown on Universality: ‘There was absolutely a lot of cringe'
Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent Midway through Universality, Natasha Brown inducts us into the dinner party from hell. Freelance journalist Hannah has invited three old university friends to her new flat, and it's clear they've only turned up because one of her articles has recently gone viral. Just about every conversational taboo — money, religion, politics – is broached in spectacularly awkward fashion. Eventually, the faux politeness threatens to devolve into an all-out ideological slanging match. This portrayal of how friendships can decay in adulthood, fuelled by mutual resentments about privilege and status, is so acutely observed it's excruciating. 'There was absolutely a lot of cringe,' Brown laughs as she remembers writing this scene from her second novel. She's speaking from her home in London, the Zoom frame lined with rows of crowded bookshelves, and what feels like the year's first hint of sun trickling in through the window. The author, 35, has a sharp, unrelenting eye for the tangled dynamics that simmer underneath the surface of social interactions. Her debut novel Assembly, released in 2021 just as Britain was blearily emerging from back-to-back lockdowns, showed off that scalpel-like precision. In it, an unnamed narrator, a Black British woman who has made a 'metric s*** ton' of money in finance, attends a garden party hosted at the country house owned by her white boyfriend's (ancestrally) wealthy parents. Myths about class, race, meritocracy, and belonging are set up only to be shattered. At the time, Brown said she wanted to explore what a story about someone who 'has it all' and still feels dissatisfied might look like from the perspective of a person of colour. Praise came thick and fast; so too did comparisons to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. British Vogue hailed Assembly as 'the debut novel of the summer', and the book went on to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. Two years later, in 2023, Brown was named on literary magazine Granta's prestigious Best of Young British Novelists list. Brown, who grew up in London and studied maths at the University of Cambridge, wrote Assembly in snatches of time she could claim between her nine-to-five job working in financial services. 'With the first book, it was really my gym and socialising time that disappeared,' she recalls. Universality was written in an equally piecemeal manner but under very different circumstances, with Brown smack bang in the middle of the promotional circus for Assembly, which took her to Europe and Australia. 'This book was really snatched, (written) in little snatched minutes in the hotel, on trains,' she says. 'I remember once I really offended some writers I was travelling on the train with in France because they were like, 'Come on, have a drink' and I said, 'I need to make my word count!'' In conversation, Brown is softly spoken and quick to laugh, but her drive and focus are palpable. Her considered replies are laser-focused on the craft of writing and teem with literary references from Roland Barthes to Tom Wolfe to the journalist Janet Malcolm. She doesn't own a TV, she admits, in order to avoid distraction. The backdrop may have been different, but her mission statement for book number two is similar. In Assembly, Brown says she tried to 'explore the question of neutrality and language' — to get to grips with how words may seem impartial and unbiased, though are often anything but. When the narrator travels to schools to speak to youngsters about her high-flying career, is she inspiring them or is she parroting empty truisms about meritocracy that only perpetuate the status quo? 'How many women and girls has she lied to?' she asks herself. With Universality, she wanted to look at similar ideas about language, but this time 'from a totally different angle — to step back and explore people who are really powerful when it comes to language and really know how to use words for maximum effect'. To do that, Brown turned her attention to that very 21st-century phenomenon: the viral long read. You know the kind — the sort of stranger-than-fiction article that captivates certain corners of the internet for a couple of weeks, prompting social media debates, spin-off think pieces and, if the writer is lucky, talk of a lucrative streaming adaptation. Brown wanted to 'play around with the contrast between fact and fiction, entertainment and real life', to explore the uneasy contradictions between 'the ultimate omniscient narrator' of a journalistic piece and 'the novel's mainstay, the unreliable narrator'. So, Universality begins with a magazine article, written by Hannah the freelancer, which sets up an irresistible whodunit mystery: a gold bar is used as a weapon in a vicious attack on a Yorkshire farmer, then stolen. The missing ingot is a 'connecting node', drawing together an anarchist group, a wealthy banker, and an outspoken columnist with elastic beliefs. Hannah attempts to uncover the identity of the attacker, a quest that takes her through post-lockdown Britain; at the same time, she attempts to make a state-of-the-nation diagnosis. But are her conclusions too simple, too easily palatable for the magazine's readers? Brown made diagrams and spreadsheets to plot out the central mystery — Assembly also started life in Excel — perhaps a hangover from her previous life in finance — but as the riddle is just about tied up, more pressing, troubling questions seem to arise. For Brown, the gold bar 'really is a MacGuffin', an object that pushes the plot along; the real mystery of the book is how and why this article came to be written in the first place. Can we take its depictions of certain, admittedly unlikeable, characters at face value? Why might we be drawn to side against them? If that all sounds a bit head-scratching, you're not wrong: Universality is the sort of book that forces you to question yourself.
