Co publisher at Sort of Books is coming to talk about Tove Jansson.

ABOUT SORT OF BOOKS Sort of Books is an independent publishing venture by Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz, founders of the Rough Guide travel series. They set the company up in 1999 mainly to help their friend Chris Stewart launch his debut book, Driving Over Lemons, which became a surprise UK bestseller (eventually selling more than a million copies).

Fired by its success, they have hand-picked three or four titles each year since. These have included four further Chris Stewart titles, nine remarkable works of fiction that Moomins creator Tove Jansson wrote for adults, most notably The Summer Book, which has sold 100,000 copies, and her three large format illustrated Moomins books.

In 2012 they launched the first ever UK publication of Jansson’s original Moomins book, The Moomins and the Great Flood and, in 2017, the eight iconic classic Moomin novels themselves, restored to their original 1950s and 1960s designs. They are also the proud publishers of acclaimed and prize-winning non-fiction titles by Kathleen Jamie, arguably Britain’s finest nature writer. Her essay collection, Sightlines, published in 2012, a follow-up to the acclaimed Findings has been awarded both the prestigious John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Award.

Turning to contemporary fiction they have published exceptional and ground-breaking novels by Jonathan Buckley, Simon Lewis, Tom Bullough and Sophie Hannah, while also reissuing a select number of neglected classics. These latter include the writing of Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, the 1920s hotel book that inspired Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, and one of the great wartime books, There’s No Home by Alexander Baron.

They have also published popular science, notably Robert Kunzig’s Mapping the Deep, telling the extraordinary story of oceanography, which won the Aventis Science Book of the Year award in 2001 and remains a key text and the urgently prescient Fixing the Climate by Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunizg in 2009.

Finally, they are delighted to keep in print Peter Blegvad’s unique Leviathan – a genre-defying comic strip collection of wordplay, puns and ideas.

TOVE JANSSON – LETTERS & BIOGRAPHY

Letters from Tove A revelatory and inspiring collection of Jansson’s personal letters. Edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson

Life, Art, Words The meticulously researched, authorised biography of Tove Jansson