A conversation with Hugh Andrew, MD and Founder of Birlinn
How did Birlinn get its name?
Birlinn is a West Highland galley and my first love is the Hebrides. Originally I had looked at the bird Capercaillie but apparently its large, lumbering and in danger of extinction so not the best of branding!
Tell us about the company ethos. Has it evolved over time?
It has remained focussed on community, connection and identity. The phrase that sums us up was uttered on the island of Mingulay, ‘I never knew there was anything important about us until I saw this book’.
Tell us about some of your favourite titles and your biggest successes
Calum’s Road was one of our biggest hits. Set on the island of Raasay its story transformed tourism to the island and we couldn’t reprint it fast enough. It is deeply moving to see people in tears at a launch with a book that meant so much. It is the story of crofter Calum Macleod who in the face of official indifference and hostility single handedly built a road to his community of Arnish. By the time he had finished he and his wife were the only two people left in Arnish. To Calum he had built a road for the future, a road to bring people back. And now they are coming back. In recent years Native (Patrick Laurie) set in Galloway which was on the Wainwright shortlist and Regeneration (Andrew Painting) on the Mar Lodge rewilding have meant much to me, as has Patrick Baker’s Unremembered Places. And of course we are interwoven with the story of Sandy McCall Smith who has stayed with us, his first publisher, for many titles through his rise to international bestsellerdom. No thanks can be too great to him. There are of course other books, too many to mention, which mean much to me.
Tell us about your aspirations for the company
To make people wish to fight for change against a faceless monolithic bureaucracy and corporate greed and realise that they connect with others through writing and can fight the leviathans which seek to crush the soul.
Do you have any reading recommendations (fiction and/or non-fiction)?
Most of my reading is abstruse early medieval history but one of the greatest books I have read came very recently – Christopher Van Hamel’s The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. If you are going to Sicily this year and haven’t packed John Julius Norwich: The Kingdom in the Sun and The Normans in Sicily, hold your flight till you get them. And for India, Charles Allen’s biography of Ashoka. David Carpenter on Magna Carta. John Guy’s wonderful biography of Becket. Too many to mention…! I have to give a shout out to my good friend Barnaby Rogerson of Eland whose travel list is the finest in the land and reacquainted me with Nigel Barley’s screamingly funny and wise The Innocent Anthropologist and A Plague of Caterpillars. As for fiction I read The Third Policeman by Flann O Brien once a year and should read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita again.
Is there anything else you would like to share with Postscript’s readers?
Apart from an obsession with Jack Russell terriers and good wine no!
