Book publication is story of cooperation

It has been a great tradition of this publishing house that all the editors, young or old, are ready to take up translation assignments."Our former head of the department, Mr Fang Ping (1921-2008), was the editor and leading translator of our publication of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare," he says.

Feng himself was the translator of Ishiguro's best-known novel The Remains of the Day. The veteran publisher of foreign language literature has been following Ishiguro's career for more than a decade. In 2009, Ishiguro's short story collection Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall came out and "we bought the copyright for its simplified Chinese edition immediately".

That marked the beginning of the company's publication of Ishiguro's whole body of work, the simplified Chinese language copyrights of which had been secured by 2017, when the Nobel Prize for literature was announced.

As previously mentioned, the publisher also has ties to the careers of major contemporary writers, such as McEwan, Murakami and Atwood, publishing their works systematically in series.

"We have built great partnerships with important publishers, writers and their agents through our dedication and the quality of our work," he says. The cover and binding design of Klara, for example, "won praise from the author himself".