Montreal-based publisher Baraka Books is committed to providing English-speaking readers in Canada and elsewhere with ideas, points of view, and creative works that might otherwise be overlooked because of cultural or linguistic barriers.
By:
ALU Editor
Share It:
Montreal-based publisher Baraka Books is committed to providing English-speaking readers in Canada and elsewhere with ideas, points of view, and creative works that might otherwise be overlooked because of cultural or linguistic barriers.
Publishing between six and eight titles a year in genres as diverse as history (Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel), biography (The Complete Muhammad Ali), literary criticism (Exhilarating Prose) and young adult (the Radisson Series by Martin Fournier), Baraka makes good on its promise to release “Progressive Books with an Accent on Québec.” In fact, launching next year is the press’ new imprint, QC Books, which aims to release four translated titles of Quebec fiction per year, beginning with a book by Éric Dupont. “We realized that Quebec has a big book culture, and we have a large number of young fiction writers who are in their 20s to 40s whose books do not come out in English,” Baraka Publisher Robin Philpot says. “Éric Dupont’s works are consistently bestsellers, yet Bestiaire—whose English title will be Life in the Royal Court of Matane—will be his first to appear in English.” (From Publishers Weekly).Their name, too, reflects this: “Baraka” is a word used in many languages with varied meanings, but all of them skew positive, such as “blessing,” “wisdom,” and “luck.” Founded just six years ago in 2009, its “BB” clover colophon has already become a signal of a book that hopes to herald change and unite its readers across languages, cultures, and geography.
