Peirene People
Welcome to our Peirene People webpage. Here we celebrate the people behind the books.
Meike Ziervogel, Publisher
Meike is a writer and journalist living in London. She grew up in Northern Germany and came to London in 1986 to study Arabic language and literature. She has worked for Reuters, Agence France Press, Financial Times TV and Routledge. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press. Meike also reviews for New Books in German and has been on the panel for New Books in Spanish. She is a committee member of the Authors Club which annually nominates the Best First Novel Award, the Dolman Travel Book Award and the Banister Fletcher Award.
Contact Meike at meike.ziervogel@peirenepress.com
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Maddy Pickard, Marketing Director
Maddy has been Peirene's Marketing Director since June 2010.
Prior to that she spent almost five years at Arts Council England.
Maddy joined the illustrious world of publishing with Aurum Press in 2003. After a couple of years learning the ropes of publishing and publicity she briefly moved into children's publishing before joining the Arts Council in 2006 where she worked across various teams and also completed an MA in Cultural Policy in 2009. Maddy ran the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (amongst other things) between 2007 and 2010, and has always loved the world of literature in translation.
Contact Maddy at maddy.pickard@peirenepress.com
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Sacha Davison Lunt, Designer
Sacha is an independent graphic designer. She has created Peirene's branding. She designs our book covers and is reponsible for the good looks of Peirene's collateral material.
Sacha graduated from the London College of Printing and has an MA in Hypermedia Studies. She specialises in editorial and book design. She worked as Art Director for the design and architecture magazine, Icon. Her clients include Eye magazine, VirginClassics, Fiell Publishing and Dulux. Sacha has also produced several design books for Taschen GmbH including: Designing the 21st Century, Scandinavian Design
and the Decorative Arts series.
God is in the details.
Contact Sacha at sacha@davisonlunt.com
Visit Sacha's website davisonlunt.com
Sacha's Peirene Manifesto:
A gift item. A design suitably special to package Meike's little European gems. Something you want to pick up and touch. Something inviting. Something made with love.
I approach each book in the knowledge that it is part of a series. Collectively, the books have a strong identity, but one flexible enough to allow the individual books to retain a sense of their own character, and shine in their own right.
That flexibility is not just about honouring the stories themselves, of course. It's also about allowing myself the freedom to play, to have fun with - or even break - the rules I've set myself, without breaking the brand identity itself. I hope to be designing the books for many years to come, and I don't ever want it to be a chore; Peirene deserves more. Each cover needs to feel familiar but fresh. A guarantee of quality, yet always slightly unexpected.
And finally, the flexibility is there to accommodate - and reflect - the many different voices that come from Peirene. In the past, I've produced books that come in 3 different languages - 3 different languages in one book, that is. Experience has taught me that French is, for example, 10-15 per cent longer than its English equivalent; and German twice that. I loosely reference this spatial difference on the covers, in the boxes that don't quite hold the title. It's not unheard of for people to read this as a mistake, a misprint. But the boxes have been made for other words, another language. These new words don't quite fit, they don't even sit in line. I'm trying to suggest visually the idea that *translation is about interpretation*.
Initially, I came to this design quite instinctively, but since then I've come to understand the lengths to which Meike goes to find translators that take the same approach - not necessarily translating the original word-for-word, but trying instead to find the essence of the book, and then bring it to life for the reader in their native tongue. Peirene's English translations become their own thing. The same but different.