Sleepers celebrates 10 years
Melbourne publisher Sleepers is celebrating its 10th birthday this year.
The anniversary coincides with a big year for the small press, which was founded in 2003 by Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner. The publisher has three debut novels out this year—Inheritance by Balli Kaur Jaswal, which was published in February, Holy Bible by Vanessa Russell in July and What Was Left by Eleanor Limprecht in September—and launched its eighth Sleepers Almanac in March. There are also plans to ‘throw a little party’.
Swinn and Dattner first met in RMIT’s professional writing and editing course, where they worked on the university’s writing anthology, Visible Ink. ‘I put myself down to be president and basically held Zo at gunpoint until she agreed to be treasurer, and so we published a book together with the rest of the Visible Ink crew, and ran monthly readings, and had a ball in that course which was kind of like life but better,’ said Swinn. ‘We were cocooned there at RMIT—it was a dynamic course, with incredibly energetic, generous teachers, and really high calibre students.’
Following university, Swinn and Dattner worked for various publishers, including a stint in the same office at Macmillan, before quitting their jobs and launching their own company in Swinn’s Collingwood warehouse. On their first day on 14 July 2003, recalls Swinn, ‘we toyed with names for the company and we toyed with ideas about what precisely the company would do, and we didn’t open any wine until we’d worked out our name and what we’d do’.
While looking for novels to publish, Sleepers built its profile by running literary salons, and eventually published its first Almanac. ‘These helped get our name out there,’ said Swinn.
The biggest challenge over the past 10 years, said Swinn, has been ‘working out how to continue with something that is fundamentally a labour of love in terms of the hours that go into it’. The highlight: ‘every book when it comes back from the printer.’
Of course there have been some particular successes. These include Steven Amsterdam winning the Age Book of the Year for Things We Didn’t See Coming, Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game ‘being sold so well into the UK’, and selling film and TV rights for SOLD (Brendan Gullifer) and Life Kills (Miles Vertigan).
Swinn is upbeat about the future of Sleepers. ‘We’d like to make sure that we continue to publish some of the best world-class literature and we’re excited about the platforms that that might be happening in. We’d never have known when we started out that we’d have an iPhone app, and we’d be reading so many things on such things as iPads.’
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Category: Local news
