Our Publishing
SELKIES HOUSE LIMITED is a new, independent, Scottish publishing house with international reach.
Addressing the pressing needs of the era—including the environment, migration, and freedom of expression—our trade fiction and nonfiction lists champion authors who have otherwise been underrepresented for reasons to do with gender, politics, or geography.
The illustrated lifestyle list explores radical beauty in its various expressions. A Gaelic literature list celebrates the renaissance of a culture ascending, while our literature in translation list brings award-winning authors and translators from around the world to English-language readers.
Our academic and reference list will draw from the latest research in ocean and earth sciences and present vernacular traditions within the built environment to new generations of students and professionals.
Design lies at the heart of everything we do—the care we put into the way our books look and are made is as important to us as the value we place on the ways in which we work with each other.
Seaweed Paper
At Selkies House we publish beautiful books that matter.
The paper on which we print our books matters.
To find it we are turning to the sea.
Today
Gift paper can be made from 10-20% seaweed mixed with FCA virgin and recycled wood pulp. The fibres are shorter and the paper is more flexible.
Tomorrow
The wholly sustainable paper we all want to see in our books is within reach if we make our wishes known.
In celebration of International Translation Day on 30th September, we are delighted to offer an online workshop for future and early-career literary translation professionals featuring two of our award-winning translators from the UK and USA.
For details and to register, please visit our contact page, here.
Difficult Language in Difficult Times
An Online Translation Workshop
with
Ellen Elias-Bursać
translator from the Croatian
of CELEBRATION by Damir Karakaš
and
Katie Brown
translator from the Spanish
of FROM SAVAGERY by Alejandra Banca
Ellen Elias-Bursać
Ellen is a past president of the American Literary Translators’ Association and translates from the Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. For ten years she was a language preceptor in the Slavic department at the University of Harvard. For six years she worked in the English Translation Unit at the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. She is the author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at A War Crimes Tribunal.
Katie Brown
Katie’s debut translation from the Spanish of FROM SAVAGERY was a winner of this year’s English PEN Award. An expert on Venezuelan literature and culture, her teaching at the University of Exeter includes an MA class on translating offensive language.
Coming in Spring 2024 - Literary fiction to discover and thrill
Author photograph
© Orianna Camejo
Translator photograph
Katie Brown
SELKIES HOUSE is thrilled to announce that its first literary translation, FROM SAVAGERY, by Venezuelan debut author Alejandra Banca and translated from the Spanish by Katie Brown, is the winner of a PEN Translates Award, announced today.
“Some books sleep, others live, others still create life” Jan Queretz, Casapaís
Hustle, dodge, pedal, breathe; love, bury, don't look back. In this fast-paced collection of stories, a lost generation of young refugees accelerates into the light with breath-taking rhythm and shimmering authenticity. These are the Savages.
In the heat of Barcelona beats the pulse of a new young underclass. Once the bright future of Venezuela, it disappeared after the country's surreal collapse. From savagery they emerge and take flight: a cohort of friends thrumming with life, there before the world but under its radar. Escaping hunger and worse in Caracas, they pedal the streets as fast-food delivery
cyclists, prostitutes, and dealers, scratching their living at speed. Through the streets of a new city whose punishing hills and dark alleys they navigate at risk, they are visible in fleeting moments on a doorstep, a corner, or weaving through rush-hour traffic.
Savages to the local population, they become hypnotic fireflies here, discovering identity, surviving insult, questioning gender, finding love, trying to forget, or is it to remember, but alive and supporting each other through stories of fear, horror, laughter, and hope.
María Eugenia pedals eighty-four frenetic hours a week, her body broken and bleeding, rapid orders pushing through to her phone that rings nonstop. She has kept in touch with Cheo who looks forward to the arrival of his girlfriend from Venezuela, but he has yet to tell her he is married to Andrés. Nataly has turned to prostitution only to fall in love with Sasha, her mysterious Russian client. Meanwhile El Loco tries to establish his reputation as a drug dealer in Madrid on the back of a clouded past in Caracas where FROM SAVAGERY opens in a funeral home, at the very moment Angélica realises she can't afford her mother's burial.
This generation comes alive through its language; as distinct as the friendship shared, it is crackling, proud, and without apology, a gust of fresh air bringing with it the spirit of a new life.
Alejandra Banca studied literature at Andrés Bello University in Caracas. Fleeing Venezuela’s collapse, she emigrated to Spain and lives in Barcelona where she worked in several hospitality and cold sales jobs before establishing herself as an English teacher. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies. SELKIES HOUSE will publish her first novel in 2025.
Katie Brown is a senior lecturer in Modern Languages at Exeter University. An expert on contemporary Latin American culture, she has appeared on BBC Radio 4's "Open Book" and is part of the women's UK, US, and Venezuela translation collective, Colaboratorio Ávila. Her translations appear regularly in the quarterly journal, Latin American Literature Today.
US rights: sold by Selkies House to Restless Books | Translation rights: contact Orianna Camejo at Lecturas de Arraigo in Madrid: lecturasdearraigo@gmail.com
UK Publication: 20 June 2024 | HB Price: £20 | ISBN: 978-1-7385220-4-0
For media enquiries, please contact: publicity@selkieshouse.com
For sales enquiries, please contact: sales@selkieshouse.com
THE GUARDIAN OF SURFACES
Bothayna Al-Essa
Translated from the Arabic
by Ranya Abdelrahmann & Sawad Hussain
Coming in Spring 2025, the launch of a stunning gift book series:
A collection of the world’s
ancient land, garden and household wisdom gathered for today’s beauty
classic writing from Ancient Greece, Rome, Moorish Spain, Japan, India, Persia and the New World
in new translations by women,
and with introductions by contemporary female experts
