Lausanne's Noir sur Blanc marks forty years of bringing Slavic literature into French
The publisher, guest of honour at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges this weekend, was founded in 1986 by Vera Hoffmann and Jan Michalski to introduce French readers to Slavic writers they could not otherwise read.
Noir sur Blanc, the Lausanne publishing house devoted to Slavic literatures, is being honoured this weekend at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges, according to Le Temps. The visit comes as the house marks forty years since its founding.
The story begins in the early 1980s at Geneva's Institut des hautes études internationales, where Vera Hoffmann met Jan Michalski. "Pour dire la vérité, ce n'était pas durant les cours, mais après, dans un pub," Hoffmann told Le Temps with a smile. The couple married and decided to start a publishing house to bring the great Slavic authors, then largely unavailable in French, to francophone readers.
Noir sur Blanc was founded in 1986 and began publishing in 1987. Le Temps describes a house built gradually and open to the wider world, one that had to learn editing, distribution and diffusion largely by doing. Its catalogue has placed Russian and Ukrainian writers side by side, among voices from across Europe.
Le Temps notes that the house's history includes the reward of a Nobel Prize, without further detail in the material available. The publisher's anniversary falls during the current rentrée littéraire in France.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
