Seagull Books, working out of Calcutta, India, with offices in London and New York, focuses on publishing world literature in English translation, serious non-fiction, culture studies, performance studies, art and cinema, with a lot of attention on exquisite design and world-class production.
Seagull Books was founded by Naveen Kishore in 1982 as an independent Indian publishing house specializing in serious books on art, theatre and cinema. It published plays by major Indian playwrights, monographs and essays by leading Indian artists, filmscripts from the best-known Indian and European filmmakers, along with academic titles on culture, society and the various arts.
Since 2005, Seagull Books London Limited has ventured into newer fields of publishing, including English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian and Latin American writers. It now boasts of a backlist of over 500 titles. Beginning with authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Theodor W. Adorno, Aimé Césaire, Thomas Bernhard, Edward Said, André Gorz, Satyajit Ray, Peter Weiss and Max Frisch, Seagull Books now represents major contemporary writers such as Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mahasweta Devi, Peter Handke, Pascal Quignard, Hélène Cixous, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Marc Augé and many more.
The hallmark 'Africa List' presents writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Maryse Condé, Ivan Vladislavić, William Kentridge, Kossi Efoui and Abdourrahman A. Waberi. European writers lesser known to the English-speaking world are also showcased by Seagull—Ralf Rothmann, Tilman Rammstedt, Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Tomas Espedal. The list expands daily . . .
In 2012, Seagull author Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature while in 2015, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, another Seagull author, received the prestigious Man Booker International Prize. Maryse Condé, whose three volumes Seagull has published in English translation, won the alternative Nobel Prize in 2018.
