Publisher of the Month

I was about to land a cadetship with The Age, or so I thought. When I missed out, I applied for a job as a publishing assistant with Cambridge University Press. Before long I was working in CUP’s Sydney office, a terrace in Surry Hills. Bits of crumbling wall would fall onto our desks, so manuscripts were often covered in sand. It has always been a glamorous industry, but one I’m very glad I fell into.

After university I knew I didn’t want to do deconstruction; I wanted to be involved with contemporary writing, so I looked for an editorial job and eventually found one, in Boston, which was no longer the Athens of America, in 1973.

In 1979, when I was twenty, I took Vincent Buckley’s poetry seminar at Melbourne University. He introduced us to the work of the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, by then in his late seventies. That summer I went to Britain in pursuit of Bunting. In Newcastle I knocked on the door of Bloodaxe Books and explained my mission to Neil Astley, the publisher. It was the first publishing office I had ever been in. I thought: this is what I am going to do. Neil phoned Bunting and I caught a bus to the council estate where he lived. We talked until the light faded. My future had found me. After I came back to Melbourne, I set up Scripsi with Peter Craven.

Ben Ball was born in Melbourne in 1970. He grew up in London, New York, and Sydney, and went to school in all of these places. He completed an Arts/Law degree, in Australia, ‘more or less entirely to create the pleasing symmetry B. Ball, BA, LLB’. In the United Kingdom he undertook an M.Phil in Contemporary English Literature. Ball worked in London in publishing for more than a decade, with Bloomsbury, Granta, and Simon & Schuster. He returned to Australia when he began working for Penguin in January 2006. In 2011 he became Penguin’s Publishing Director.