Angelique Tran Van Sang, commissioning editor at Bloomsbury

Discover your next read from one of the editors of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Jul 30, 2020

It won’t escape readers, avid or meandering, that there’s been quite a sea change in what books people are reading right now. Take a look at the bestsellers list and you’ll see Black authors dominating, scroll through your socials and see their book covers shot and shared widely. Among them, poet and activist Akala’s memoir Natives, Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (the best book I read this year) and Layla Saad for her polemic Me and White Supremacy.

The title on everyone’s anti-racist reading pile, though, is Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.

The book’s success, which took the author to the top of the official UK book charts in the wake of the death of George Floyd and a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, wasn’t just a life-changing experience for the author, it also propelled the career of a brilliant book editor, Angelique Tran Van Sang. She works at Bloomsbury, Reni’s UK publisher, as Commissioning Editor and I’m incredibly pleased she’s my first profile.

Angelique, like me, is from a Vietnamese background and we bonded straight away over our shared heritage. Because to meet someone in publishing who is from a minority background, let alone from the same ethnic extraction, is quite an achievement (and it’s thanks to BAME in Publishing for that).

A love of pho aside, however, Angelique was one of the first people I wanted to ask on to Written Approval. Alongside Why I’m, her fingerprints are all over the pages of Booker and Women’s Prize for Fiction winners and cult classics. Meanwhile, her own list of authors at Bloomsbury, one she curates herself, consolidates Angelique as one of the most exciting story shapers in UK publishing.

I’ll let Angelique take over now; she’ll talk about her career, and share a few of her favourite reads

I live in Hackney, east London now, but I’ve moved around a lot – I grew up in a small town in New Zealand, before going to university in Wellington. I stayed after graduating, and worked at the national museum’s publishing arm, Te Papa Press. Around six years ago I moved to the UK, as I longed to work in fiction, and I couldn’t really do that at the time, in New Zealand. My partner and I slept on a couch in Tooting Bec for a bit (where I encountered the best second-hand bookshop -- the owner would add books to your pile for free if he thought you would like them), before spending a year in Cambridge. We moved back to London and settled down in Herne Hill for a few years, before making the move east. When I first arrived in the UK, I had to start my career from scratch – people weren’t that open to considering my past experience. I did a few internships, and ate through my savings (I also supplemented that work with some pretty humiliating jobs, including as a receptionist for a building in the city, where I had to wear a boxy uniform and heels, and was told to stand up when the building’s owner walked in).

“The success of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race helped me on my way towards acquiring titles of my own”

I got the job at Bloomsbury after doing an internship and just getting lucky with timings. I began working as the assistant to Alexandra Pringle – and I got to work on some incredible books: Patti Smith’s M Train, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, to name just a few. When Reni Eddo-Lodge’s editor, Alexa von Hirschberg, went on maternity leave, I was asked to step in and work on the book, taking it through to publication. It was an incredibly rewarding experience. The success of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race helped me on my way towards acquiring titles of my own.

“From the first sentence of the first story, I knew I wanted to publish the book; intimate and raw, furiously funny, upending stereotypical immigrant narratives”

My first acquisition was Jenny Zhang’s story collection Sour Heart; I’d been familiar with her work for years, and had approached her directly, then her agent, and then Penguin Random House, who had bought world rights. From the first sentence of the first story, I knew I wanted to publish the book; intimate and raw, furiously funny, upending stereotypical immigrant narratives – all with a voice so distinct, shrewd and smart. I look for that immediate rush of knowing in every book I acquire, and now my list includes voices like Alexander Chee, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Julia Ebner, Catherine Cho, Ashleigh Young and Olivia Sudjic – to name just a few. They are all brilliant, sharp-minded and brave, with something important to say and the ability to do so with clarity, precision and intelligence.

Angelique’s favourite transportive reads when life is so rooted to home

Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima, Penguin Classics

“I read Territory of Light when I was staying on the island of Naoshima, Japan. My edition is a muddy green-grey, larger format, flapped paperback, part of a new series of Penguin Classics, with a photograph of a woman on the front, the shadows cast across her face, obscuring her features, behind her head, light reflects off water. It’s a slim, hypnotic novel, about a woman in Tokyo who separates from her husband and moves into a light-filled apartment with her young daughter. As the year progresses, the woman goes through a divorce, raising her daughter alone, and trying to come to terms with who she now is. The apartment is almost like a character, a reflection of her inner turmoil. It has a contained feeling to it, brimming with anger but never truly overflowing, and you can read it in an afternoon – as I did, tangled in cool sheets in a little beachside caravan, after a long morning of walking.”

Another Country, James Baldwin, Penguin Modern Classics

“Last year I was feeling extremely burnt out at work, so I decided to take a solo trip to Paris. It was a really warm September, and I spent most of my time eating, walking around galleries and along the streets, and sitting on those green chairs in Le Jardin du Luxembourg, just past the chess players, reading into the evenings. This was the novel that engrossed me for much of that time, a battered second-hand copy, an old Penguin classic with a black and white Herman Leonard photograph of saxophonist Sonny Stitt, wreathed in smoke. It’s an intense, complex novel, that opens with Rufus Scott, a Harlem jazz musician, then follows his family, friends and lovers. Baldwin writes with mastery and unparalleled eloquence; I finished the novel with my reading standards reset.”

Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, Nina Mingya-Powles, The Emma Press

“I first read this on an unseasonably warm weekend, a few weeks before lockdown. It transported me, back to New Zealand where the author was born and went to university, but also, obviously, to Shanghai, where she spent a year abroad – and she captures so perfectly those feelings of landing in a new place, and trying to find your bearings, through food. It explores so much despite its length (a mere 85pp): what it’s like to grow up mixed-race, the relationship between women and food (‘It is tiring to be a woman who loves to eat in a society where hunger is not something to be satisfied but controlled’), loneliness, nostalgia and the joy of an Asian supermarket. Her sentences are beautifully rendered, and her evocations of food are elegant and comforting. It’s one to return to, and savour, ideally with a side of dumplings.”

Trust Exercise, Susan Choi, Serpent’s Tail

“A classic marmite novel. If you can subvert my reading expectations, I will love you for it, and I bought Choi’s entire backlist after I read this. I took a bound proof on a cold wintery Christmas trip to Margate with friends. We’d rented an old mansion that featured an outrageous bathroom full of plants, paintings and candles. I’d draw a hot bath, and settle in with this and a glass of wine. It starts off almost like a rough mix of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal and Sally Rooney’s Normal People – young love, heightened emotion, miscommunications, class differences and a really intense classroom situation. Halfway through, the book takes a jagged turn, and everything you had settled into is thrown into question.”

Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy, Hamish Hamilton

“I’m cheating with this one a little as technically it’s two books, but as it forms Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ I want to consider them as one. Hamish Hamilton republished Things I Don’t Want to Know in a slick blue paperback, to accompany the bright yellow hardback with its little insert of a still from Vivre Sa Vie. I can’t remember when I first read them, but suffice to say I have given these books as presents to many a friend, and I think they make for great holiday reading, anywhere, in any season. I love Levy’s fiction, but these are something else.”

Win this month’s recommended books!

I have copies of Tiny Moons, Trust Exercise and Deborah Levy’s latest novel to give away to one reader. To win, just hit subscribe and everyone who signs up to Written Approval by 10 August will be entered into a draw. UK residents only.

Interested in Angelique’s authors and topics? Here’s further reading and watching…

Rethinking Diversity in Publishing - a recent report into the inequalities in the workforce
🗞️ New Statesman: How the publishing industry responded to Black Lives Matter
🗞️ The New York Times: In This Pandemic, Personal Echoes of the Aids Crisis by Alexander Chee
🗞️ The Guardian interview with Catherine Cho: “My baby had devils’ eyes”: The Reality of Postpartum Psychosis
🖥️ Watch Nina Mingya-Powles read The Great Wall from her poetry collection, Magnolia

You can find Angelique on Twitter @ange_tranvan

What I’ve been reading & listening to this month

📖 Humankind by Rutger Bregman - review for BookBrunch
📖 Heat by Jean Rhys (part of her short story collection for Penguin Modern Classics) - review for Oh Magazine, issue 55
🎧 The Periodic Table by Primo Levi on BBC Sounds. This is such a good platform for audiobooks and dramatisations, especially if you don’t want to use Audible and throw more of your money Amazon’s way…
📖 New Statesman - a rich resource for cultural goings-on. I have to link to this one about Virago, Inside the Feminist Publisher that Upended the World, because, well, Lennie Goodings is a literary legend and one of the nicest people I’ve met in publishing.
📖 I can’t not shoutout The Profile, a deep dive into the world’s leading business leaders and entrepreneurs. It’s written by Polina Marinova who has been a wonderful mentor to me in the creation of this newsletter, generously giving her time and insight. A former writer at Fortune Magazine, she quit her job at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to run The Profile full-time. She wrote about her experience here, and it’s packed with tips for anyone thinking about striking out on their own…

What’s on your reading list?

Written Approval