Five years ago Jacques Testard went to the Frankfurt Book Fair and acquired the English-language rights for a book by a little-known Ukrainian-born author shunned by mainstream publishers.
A year later that £3,500 investment — the biggest advance ever paid by his newly formed Fitzcarraldo publishing house — paid off handsomely when Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature, enabling him to command a “good six figure sum” for the US rights to her book Second-hand Time, an account of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Next week Mr Testard will head back to Frankfurt with another Nobel winner on his books: Olga Togarczuk, the Polish novelist whose works were honoured this week by the Swedish Academy for their imagination and wit. Shortly after the announcement in Stockholm, Mr Testard ordered the printing of 30,000 copies of Ms Togarczuk’s novels, Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in anticipation of increased sales.