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Key quote from the piece - "Adults, who tend to have more disposable income than children, are arguably the best thing that’s ever happened to Big Toy, an industry that has long been dependent on an uncertain revenue stream: customers who have to beg their parents for pocket money."

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Why Adults Are Playing with Toys

By Diego Lasarte

October 3, 2026

We might call it the Great Regression. This summer, the toy industry hit a milestone: reportedly, adult-only households accounted for the majority of toy sales in the U.S., suggesting that childless grownups are rapidly becoming the main consumer base for action figures, trading cards, plushies, and other products traditionally designed for kids. Even still, when I recently visited the F.A.O. Schwarz flagship, in Rockefeller Center, I found it mildly uncomfortable to be a grown man alone in a toy store, despite my being a member of the statistically appropriate demographic. Thankfully, I was there to meet someone: Sharon Price John, a toy-industry veteran, who helped popularize the increasingly prescient term “kid-ulting” during her time as the president and C.E.O. of Build-A-Bear. We had plans to, well, build a bear.

Build-A-Bear, which allows customers to create customized stuffed animals more or less from scratch, has six-hundred-plus workshops around the world. Many of them are situated in shopping malls, but there happens to be a sizable one inside of F.A.O. Schwarz. It took me a while to find John within the sprawling, three-story toy store; at one point, I got lost near the piano that Tom Hanks danced across in the movie “Big.” When we finally met up, she explained to me that when Build-A-Bear first released a plushie version of Toothless, a character from the adventure-fantasy movie “How to Train Your Dragon,” the company began seeing social-media posts of adults posing with it. “That was one of the early items where we were like, ‘Something’s fundamentally shifted in how many adults are buying these products,’ ” John said. “And then ‘Minions’ was the next one.” John, who is sixty-two years old and has a mild Southern twang, was wearing a knit blazer and cat-eye glasses. She started working in the toy industry in 1994, when she took a job at Mattel. (Over the summer, she left her post at Build-A-Bear to become the head of Carter’s, a children’s-apparel company, but she remains on Build-A-Bear’s board of directors.) As with many people who have spent much of their lives devoted to a single subject, she is prone to getting philosophical about hers.

“We’ve pushed off adulthood and marriage,” she said, as we walked to the Build-A-Bear Workshop at the rear of the store. She paused to dodge a whirring boomerang. “People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.” Under her leadership, Build-A-Bear adapted its offerings to appeal more to adults, leaning into what she called the nostalgia economy. The results have been staggering: between 2020 and 2025, Build-A-Bear’s stock rose more than two thousand per cent; within the same period, the company’s share of adult and teen customers grew to forty per cent.

As John showed me around the workshop, taking me to a section where customers select a droopy animal pelt before moving on to the “stuff-me station,” she perused the various options—a smiling elephant, a frog with bulging eyes, branded characters, like Snoopy and Stitch—and picked out a bunny-rabbit skin. We pumped polyester into the rabbit’s body until it was plump, complete with delightfully floppy ears. “There’s a connection to how it made you feel when you were a kid,” John said, as she carefully put a dress on her rabbit. “When we do a Harry Potter bear, that has an innate, associative, synapses connection.” I had picked out a basic Teddy bear for my project. John, perhaps sensing my reluctance to indulge in childhood nostalgia, encouraged me to pick out some accessories. “He’s naked!” she said. “How about a hat, at least?” I settled for a fabric heart that goes inside the bear and beats when you press down on it.

From 2024 to early 2026, John chaired the board of the Toy Association, a trade group whose members include the biggest names in the business, including Hasbro and Mattel. Her tenure coincided with major growth in the U.S. toy industry, which now has a market size of almost fifty billion dollars, thanks, in part, to the rise of adult consumers. To some extent, this shift can be traced to an industry-wide marketing strategy to remove the social stigma around adults owning toys, a phenomenon that accelerated during the pandemic. As adults retreated indoors and spent less on restaurants and travel, retail sales skyrocketed, and toys were especially popular. In 2020, U.S. toy sales grew by sixteen per cent, a turnaround after three consecutive years of decline, as market researchers discovered that adults found toys soothing in a time of global uncertainty. By June, 2020, Lego had adopted the slogan “Adults Welcome,” and, in 2022, McDonald’s launched its first “Adult Happy Meal.”

As we finished up our bears—John was getting hers embroidered with her daughter’s name—a group of about a dozen adults walked by. They all wore bear-shaped party crowns. John asked them what the occasion was. A woman named Kay, who wore a pink shirt that said “Kay Day,” explained that it was her fifty-eighth birthday. “We all play mah-jongg together. That is how we met,” Kay said. The group let out a cheer. I asked Kay if she and her friends were all making bears for themselves. “Yes,” she replied. “Or cats.”

Adults, who tend to have more disposable income than children, are arguably the best thing that’s ever happened to Big Toy, an industry that has long been dependent on an uncertain revenue stream: customers who have to beg their parents for pocket money. Capitalizing on “kid-ulting,” and, to a lesser extent, “adultolescence,” was a major theme at this year’s Toy Fair, the Toy Association’s annual convention and one of the largest toy festivals in the world, second only to Spielwarenmesse, a toy trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. Toy Fair is held at the Javits Center, in Manhattan, and upon entering I was greeted by an enormous Pikachu hanging from the rafters, not unlike the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. As I walked down the narrow aisles of the convention floor, I spotted an award displayed at the Lego booth, for a product collaboration with Nintendo: “Kidult Toy of the Year.” Later, I came across a company called dreamGEAR, which sells retro video games. “Even older adults, when they see these things, they all of a sudden relate to their childhood,” Kamran Hayempour, a sales representative, told me. “ ‘Oh, my God, Atari! I want to see that again—I want to play the games I used to play.’ ”

Eventually, I met a prominent kid-ult. His name is Tristan Wigglesworth, but on YouTube, where he posts videos about his collection of Funko Pops—vinyl figurines of anything and everything in pop culture—he goes by Top Pops, and has an audience of more than three million subscribers. Tristan, who is twenty-five, was wearing sweatpants and a baseball cap that perfectly framed his boyish, round face. “Maybe ten or fifteen per cent of my views are from a younger audience,” he told me, bouncing up and down on his heels. “The majority of them, I think, are between twenty-five and forty-four.” This estimate, based on YouTube’s user-demographic data, was backed up by his experiences at other conventions, such as Comic-Con, where he is often approached by adult fans.

Tristan owns more than five thousand Funko Pops, and his videos exhaust every possible angle on the subject, documenting what happens when, say, you leave a Funko Pop submerged in Prime (Logan Paul’s signature energy drink) for a full week. In one, he discusses what he calls “R-rated” Funko Pops, or figurines of characters like Borat and Satan. The video opens: “For the most part, Funko Pops are for all ages, but there are definitely some exceptions.”

As with Labubus or Pokémon trading cards, there are limited-production runs of certain Funko Pop models, creating rare products that collectors can compete over. These toys hold their value relatively well on the secondary market, leading customers to view them as a type of investment known as a “passion asset.” (A study by the Higher School of Economics found that some unopened Lego sets see an average annual return on investment of eleven per cent—far better than the R.O.I. of Beanie Babies.) For some older customers, who see their toy collections as part of their financial portfolios, “kid-ulting” is perhaps their version of being a fiscally responsible adult.

At Toy Fair, I had an appointment with Maddie Michalik, a trends expert at the Toy Association. We sat down next to a row of dancing mascots, including an anthropomorphic watermelon and a dog with flight goggles who, I later learned, was a major character on “PAW Patrol.” Michalik listed various motivations that the Toy Association has observed among kid-ults. “It’s the nostalgia factor for some products,” she said. “It’s display value for some products. It’s collecting items from your favorite fandoms.” She went on, “It’s not something to be ashamed of anymore. There’s no longer this cultural stigma that toys are uncool.” Looking ahead, she added, “We’re really focussing on this idea that toys are just not something that you’re aging out of.”

Some observers see a connection between failing to “age out” of childhood pursuits and the erosion of the typical milestones that mark adulthood. As Sharon Price John had intimated earlier, the marriage rate in the U.S. fell to a record low in 2019, and couples are having children later and later, if at all. Nearly half of adults under the age of thirty live with their parents and many don’t anticipate ever being able to afford their own home; this further enables a sort of perpetual adolescence. “Life stages have started to collapse in on each other,” Keith Hayward, a social theorist and the author of “Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood,” told me. “It’s tough to buy a house,” he added. “You might say, ‘Oh, those things are out of my reach. Screw it. I’m gonna buy that lightsabre.’ ”

Hayward’s book argues that arrested development has become endemic among adults, and that, increasingly, society is “driven by infantile preoccupations and let’s-pretend distractions.” This trend is visible in the fact that most readers of young-adult fiction are much older than the intended audience, and in stories about “Disney Adults” going into debt to visit their favorite theme parks. Hayward sees some of this as escapism: “An alternate reality plays really well when the current reality is not great.” But he pins most of the blame on corporations, which have long operated on the logic that it’s easier to sell things to children. The problem with that strategy, though, is that children grow up. And so, Hayward explained, “advertisers and marketers have been deliberately trying to extend childhood.” It seems they’ve succeeded.

Before I left Toy Fair, I met up with Tristan again, and we walked around the Funko booth. I learned that the company had flown him out from Canada, where he lives, to make promotional content about the convention. We said hello to his mother, who had come to the conference with him, and to several Funko employees, including Josh Simon, the C.E.O. of the company. Simon, who wore an Acne Studios sweater spun with yak wool, is a former Netflix executive who was hired, in 2025, to help turn around Funko, which had posted sales upward of a billion dollars in the years after the pandemic, before seeing business decline. Targeting adult consumers, he told me, is part of his business plan. “When I was a kid, my parents were not playing video games,” he said. “I think people would have thought it would be quite odd if they were. Whereas now, no one thinks twice about a forty-seven-year-old playing Fortnite.” (Simon, who was forty-seven when we spoke, has since turned forty-eight.) I asked how many Funko Pops he personally owns. “If I had to count, it’s near a hundred,” he said. “I literally have them displayed all over my house. Which was interesting, because my wife has, like, a very sharp eye for design and décor.”

Simon cited “fandom culture” as one of the reasons that adults are so interested in toys. Funko Pops, in particular, are a way of unlocking endless I.P. material: in the same way that adults want to build a “Minions” plushie, they may desire a Minion figurine, or a pint-size Gru—the Minions’ human leader—in the form of a Funko Pop. Increasingly, your favorite character is no longer limited to a single movie or comic book. There are endless sequels, spinoffs, theme parks, and, of course, toys. Like Simon, you can fill your home with this merchandise, completely immersing yourself in your favorite media franchise. Tristan agrees that this is why so many people are drawn to Funko Pops. “I think the thing is that—and this is kind of like Funko’s motto, too—but everybody’s a fan of something,” he told me.

After my interview with Simon, I was offered a tour of the latest innovations in Funko Pop technology. The company’s employees walked me past shelves and shelves of small boxes containing physical manifestations of popular video-game, TV, and movie characters. I glimpsed a square-headed Mario; Captain America holding a small plastic shield; even Hello Kitty was there, with a bow in front of her ear. I thought about how, after a U.S. drone strike assassinated the Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, an Iranian cleric named Shahab Moradi wondered which high-profile American figure Tehran should target as retribution. “Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob?” Moradi said. “All of their heroes are cartoon characters. They’re all fictional.”

Ultimately, I was guided to a sparkling new machine that Funko was rolling out across the globe. It advertised a service that sounded unfortunately close to assisted suicide—Pop! Yourself—but was, in fact, a quick and easy way to make a Funko Pop in your likeness. “So you’ve got folks that have been collecting Pops,” Jen Hann, one of the brains behind Pop! Yourself, told me. “They collect other things within I.P.s, and then they want to see themselves in that, right? This is part of their identity.” She described the forty-dollar price of popping yourself as “approachable,” and told me that one of the most appealing things about the machine is that it allows users to transport themselves into their favorite pieces of content. “We’ve done some of these collabs with K-pop and ‘Stranger Things.’ I can wear a Hawkins shirt. I can be fully immersed in that world,” she said. “I’m going to use this stylized Pop figure—and now I can go in.”

[In addition, here is LitHub's annual piece on what the odds are atm if you are interested. FT piece below if the link doesn't work for you]

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As the Swedish Academy chooses the winner of the book world’s most prestigious award, Simon Kuper looks back at an august ideal often marred by politics and bias

Alfred Nobel was a keen but mediocre writer. The Swedish dynamite tycoon wrote unpublished poems and a play featuring a 40-minute torture scene. To the dismay of relatives keen to inherit his fortune, his handwritten will of 1895 endowed five awards, including a prize for literature. Nobel instructed “the Academy in Stockholm” to give it to the writer of “the most outstanding work in an ideal [idealisk] direction”. The Swedish Academy spent decades puzzling over what “ideal” meant, before quietly dropping the criterion.

Next Thursday, a door will open in a gilded hall in Stockholm and the Academy’s formally dressed permanent secretary will step forward to announce, in Swedish and English, the winner of this year’s literature Nobel. A year ago it was Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”.

Now prediction markets favour Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue or the American novelist Thomas Pynchon to win the SKr12mn (£910,000) in prize money — though nobody really knows, as today’s Academy is less leaky than it was before a #MeToo scandal prompted a sweeping overhaul. And the pundits usually guess wrong.

The prize is ritually mocked. The Nigerian poet Chinweizu Ibekwe once marvelled at “the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes . . . should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the whole wide world”. British writer Tim Parks asks, unanswerably, how “Swedish professors” can compare an Indonesian poet with a Cameroonian novelist, both perhaps read in translation.

And yet, says Daniel Medin, professor of comparative literature at the American University of Paris: “The Nobel is the big one for international fiction. There is no comparison.” He itemises its three distinctive features: “It’s a prize for a body of work, by an international writer, that has more than a century of tradition behind it.” The Nobel shapes the global canon — even if the globe can push back. The award’s history also charts the evolution of literary taste.

There has always been a comic discrepancy between the weight of the prize and the parochialism of the judges. The Academy’s 18 life members — known as “The Eighteen” — are Swedish writers, literary historians, linguists and a jurist, some of them obscure even in Sweden. There were barely any female members until this century.

Michael Sohlman, a former longtime executive director of the Nobel Foundation, whose grandfather was instrumental in ensuring the prizes were created, notes the perennial risk of “Nobelitis” that leads some in the prize’s orbit who confuse its importance with their own.

Yet Sohlman argues that Stockholm is a good place from which to judge world literature. The city is small but outward-looking. Its upper classes traditionally read English, French and German, and don’t kid themselves that their national literature is world-beating. Even so, the Academy has awarded Sweden eight Nobels — more than each of Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

The very first award, in 1901, made international news. Somehow nobody nominated Leo Tolstoy, whereas 17 members of the Académie Française endorsed the French poet Sully Prudhomme, and he won. The prize in its early years was treated as a competition between nations like the Olympics, says Sohlman.

But he thinks that “productive scandals” have helped make the award great. The literature prize has never been as controversial as the frankly political Peace Prize; but because greatness in literature is more subjective than in the sciences, the Academy’s choice reliably angers critics. They delight in drawing up lists of overlooked greats — James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Constantine Cavafy, et cetera — though some of these achieved renown only after death.

The Academy’s permanent secretary when the prize began, Carl David af Wirsén, saw the job as crowning “the great men of continental [ie European] literature”. Women and non-Europeans couldn’t express universal truths. Admittedly, the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore won in 1913, but for his English translations of his Gitanjali prose poems.

WB Yeats, winner in 1923, wrote an account of his Nobel experience, “The Bounty of Sweden”, which captures the bewilderment that afflicts many laureates. When The Irish Times phones to say he has won, Yeats and his wife celebrate by cooking sausages. Heading to Stockholm for the ceremony with the Swedish king, Yeats sees faces staring in through the train window. He wonders what they are looking at, until someone explains they are looking at him. Fifty-five years later, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer strikes exactly the same tone: after a breakfast of eggs and bagels at his local drugstore on Miami Beach, he returns home to an unexpected phone call.

The prize soon acquired the prestige to certify entire “new” national literatures. The exotic beneficiary in 1930 was the US, when Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate. The American winner of 1938, Pearl Buck, is remembered only as the prize’s chief dud. She faded into obscurity soon after writing her bestselling account of Chinese peasant life, The Good Earth. Buck was a first-time nominee, and that mis-step generated the unwritten rule that first-time nominees can’t win.

The Academy tries to make choices that will look good decades later. It often fails. Many laureates, such as the German Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Paul von Heyse (1910) have vanished, along with Buck. But Medin doesn’t blame the Academy. Almost all writers fade away, he says.

The Academician Kjell Espmark drew up an influential division of the award’s history into distinct periods. From 1946 through 1949, the Academy had a happy run of anointing literary pioneers: Hermann Hesse, André Gide, TS Eliot and the hitherto under-appreciated William Faulkner (who complained that the ceremony “was as long as a Mississippi funeral”).

One uncrowned pioneer was the American poet Ezra Pound. His applauding of the Holocaust on Italian Fascist radio had been “a ‘subhuman’ reaction”, said Academician and future UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. Where to draw the political line was a tricky judgment: Luigi Pirandello, who supported Fascism, won in 1934.

The prize was at its most politicised during the cold war, when the Academy chose the unreliable Soviet writer Boris Pasternak (1958) and dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Pasternak initially accepted the nobelevka, as the award is popularly known in Russia — but then, under pressure from the regime, rejected “this undeserved prize which has been presented to me”.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the Nobel in 1964, noted among his reasons that the prize was “reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East.” (Sartre also felt “tortured” by the “enormous sum” of prize money, “a very heavy burden”.)

Before the Academy crowned Solzhenitsyn, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow warned that this “would lead to difficulties for our relations with the Soviet Union”. The Academy replied: “Yes, that could well be so, but we are agreed that Solzhenitsyn is the most deserving candidate.”

With the global decline of reading, the prize may never be so political again. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, today’s autocracies worry more about TikTok influencers.

From the late 1970s the Academy used the prize to draw attention to lesser-known talents such as Elias Canetti and Jaroslav Seifert. Medin says: “I know this from being on juries: there is always a pleasure if you can shape literary history.”

By the 1980s, the Academy — earlier than most of the western literary establishment — began looking beyond the west. This helped spur it into a more professional process. This starts with “qualified nominators” — members of literary institutions and academies, literature professors and previous laureates — who can propose winners. Some proposals consist of one word: “Sartre”, “Malraux”. Others are persuasive essays that push writers into contention. Certain writers such as Philip Roth (who never won) and Günter Grass (crowned in 1999) become semi-permanent candidates, considered year after year.

Since 2021, a group of designated outside experts writes annual reports on their fields of expertise. Nobody can nominate themselves, though there’s a tradition of writers lobbying for the prize by giving talks in Gothenburg or Stockholm and then flirting with Academy members over drinks.

A “Nobel Committee” of four or five academicians whittles down the nominations to a shortlist of five, which the Eighteen spend the summer reading. They decide in early October.

Yet now that they have to consider the entire world, where to start? Helpfully, many African and Asian candidates write in English, the language of 13 of the 31 laureates from 1991 (South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer) to 2021 (Abdulrazak Gurnah of Tanzania).

And some academicians are influenced by two proofs of quality: a record of winning other major prizes, and being amply translated. A “universal” writer is someone whose work transcends their own language, says Medin.

Translation has become central to the award. A new book, Literary Translation and the Nobel Prize, edited by Paul Tenngart and Karl Ågerup, argues that translators can help make laureates. The translators of German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (winner in 1966), Pablo Neruda (1971) and Mo Yan (2012) all sat in the Swedish Academy.

The Nobel has helped make the international canon more inclusive. After going global, the prize has recently become gender-equal. This followed a #MeToo scandal in 2017, when 18 women accused the French husband of Academician Katarina Frostenson of sexual assault and rape. He was later jailed. In a year of global scandals, this one was little noticed outside Sweden, but it remade the Academy. Several members quit — although the body’s rules forbid resignation — and the post-scandal “Eighteen” included many more women. They awarded the 2018 prize, a year late, to Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and there have been three female laureates since 2018. In fact, notes Kaj Schueler, author of a Swedish book on the prize, there’s been a precise pattern: male and female victories alternate. If that continues, then after Krasznahorkai’s win in 2025, this year’s laureate would be a woman, perhaps it will be Xue’s year?

The winners’ reactions are part of the award’s lore. John Steinbeck in 1962, when asked whether he deserved the Nobel, replied, “Frankly, no”. (Many critics agreed.) Samuel Beckett (1969) was on holiday in Tunisia with his wife Suzanne when a telegram from his French publisher arrived: “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Suzanne, when told the news, exclaimed, “Quelle catastrophe.” Beckett dubbed December 10, the annual date of the award ceremony, “Nobloodybeldamday”.

In 2007 Doris Lessing, clambering out of a taxi laden with groceries, was unpleasantly surprised to see reporters camped in her front garden. Told she had won, she exclaimed, “Oh, Christ.” Asked to elaborate, she said, “Well, it’s been going on now for thirty years. One can’t get more excited than one gets, you know.”

In 2014, Peter Handke said, “They should finally abolish the Nobel Prize,” and then won it, controversially given his support for Serbian nationalism, in 2019. Bob Dylan, winner in 2016, ignored the Academy’s phone calls and didn’t acknowledge the prize for over a fortnight.

Yet easy as it is to dismiss the prize, and its inevitable element of randomness, it matters. Dylan’s award was ridiculed but sparked a global debate on what constitutes literature. Gloriously, too, the prize is only concerned with a writer’s supposed quality, not their popularity: laureates Elfriede Jelinek (Austria, 2004) and Herta Müller (Germany and Romania, 2009) weren’t bestsellers even in their own countries.

The Nobelpreis-Effekt, as the Germans call it, can turbocharge sales. The month after short-story writer Alice Munro won in 2013, her sales jumped 4,424 per cent in her native Canada and 4,213 per cent (probably from a low base) in Italy. The beneficiaries are often small presses that are nowadays the most likely to publish literature in translation. In the English-language world, Fitzcarraldo in south-east London, with only six full-time employees, had four authors, Svetlana Alexievich, Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse crowned from 2015 through 2023. If Ernaux’s books reach one kid in a faraway country who hadn’t heard of her before, the prize matters, says Medin.

And it matters more in a world where book reviews and reading itself are in decline. Only the Nobel announcement can get a poet’s name trending on social media. Next Thursday’s announcement, with all its attendant scorn and outrage, is an ancient ritual that may be good for literature.

Jacques Testard is transforming our reading habits, one blue book at a time

At the age of 29, Jacques Testard set up a publishing house because no one in publishing would employ him. Born in France and schooled in London, he had wanted to go into academia before a series of internships made him realise that publishing was “another way to be serious about books”. In 2014, when he struggled to find a permanent opening, he decided to launch his own house. His ambition was not just to be an editor but to find and publish “writers at the cutting edge of contemporary literature” – including, significantly, work in translation. He had 18 months until the money ran out. “I thought, ‘I’ll give this a go and see what happens, and maybe in a few years’ time someone will give me a job.’”

Every publisher is a story, says Ray O’Meara, the house’s art director, and the story of Fitzcarraldo Editions is very simple. Twelve years ago, mainstream UK publishers did not believe there was a market for translated literature. It was a gap Testard was able to plug. The first book he published that year was Zone by Mathias Énard, a 521-page stream-of-consciousness account of an amphetamine–fuelled journey across Italy, written in a single sentence, which he had discovered when he read it in French. For the new house, it was something of a mission statement. That same year, still the sole employee, Testard made an offer for Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Second-hand Time. The book was already a bestseller in Russia and had sold well in France and Germany but there was no competition for the UK rights. Testard’s opening bid of £2,000 was rejected; he upped it a little and it was accepted. The following year Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature and there was an eight-way auction for the US rights.

Today, Fitzcarraldo Editions has become a hallmark for a generation. Its signature International Klein Blue and clean cream titles include Nobel- and Pulitzer-prize winners, with authors ranging from French memoirist Annie Ernaux to New York-based war reporter Jon Lee Anderson and Hong Kong novelist Dorothy Tse. It specialises in contemporary literary fiction and long-form essays, seeking out work that is determinedly “innovative, imaginative, ambitious”, broadly kept at a 50-50 split between English language and literature in translation. Cult hits include Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, an interrogation of millennial life; The Plague, essays on death and humanity by PEN Pinter-award-winner Jacqueline Rose; and this year’s Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices From Gaza by Samar Yazbek. A poetry list launched last year: this May, American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney won the Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name, while Makenna Goodman’s novel Helen of Nowhere is currently longlisted for the Booker Prize.

It’s an extraordinary outcome for a house that started out with a single employee, 18 months’ funding, and the modest aim of publishing six books a year. “I feel fortunate to have started a press when I did,” says Testard with understatement when we meet in Fitzcarraldo’s offices in a former factory in Peckham Rye, south-east London. “I guess I turned up at the right time.” 

“Fitzcarraldo is forging ahead on its own path and terms,” says Harriet Moore, literary agent at Alexander Aitken. “They have a robust commitment to the long view, a confidence in their own sensibility and vision, and their books will last. It offers a place where writers can think seriously and strangely, work against the expected, follow their obsessions, play.” 

“Jacques is concerned about quality, not quantity,” says Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in 2023; Fitzcarraldo had published Septology, a seven-part novel in a single sentence, the previous year. “He has trusted me.” Fosse had won numerous international awards, but his prose was not published in the UK until Fitzcarraldo released Scenes from a Childhood in 2018. 

“Jacques is an attentive editor who gives excellent advice and is deeply respectful of authors,” says Ernaux. The Years had been published to acclaim in France in 2008 but it was not until 2018 that Fitzcarraldo published the translation to a rapturous reception, credited as contributing towards Ernaux’s 2022 Nobel win. (Testard had argued the case to nominate it for the International Booker despite it being hybrid-memoir rather than fiction; it was shortlisted.)

It now seems absurd that Ernaux, Fosse and Alexievich (as well as Nobel-winner Olga Tokarczuk, whose Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a Fitzcarraldo bestseller) had not been published in the UK sooner. Testard shrugs when this is put to him, pointing out that when Fitzcarraldo launched there was still a tendency in bookshops to shelve international literature in its own category, “almost labelling it as a separate genre”. He attributes this partly to a British Empire legacy; that with the Commonwealth there’s “a sense that you’re [already] bringing writers in from the peripheries”. There is also the commercial aspect – “this notion that translation is more expensive, and you’ll never be able to recoup the money”. But there is also the question of discovering it in the first place. Testard grew up reading “indiscriminately” in English and French, and he also reads Spanish. “There are very, very few editors in UK publishing who read in other languages,” he says. “In Spain or France or Germany you have to have three or four languages to be in the editorial positions we are in.” 

Testard, 41, possesses the extreme courtesy often typical of his generation, underscored by a certain steel. Wearing a collarless blue shirt and dark trousers, he talks fluently and rapidly about how his frustrations with the anglophone publishing industry brought him where he is today. The open-plan space, now housing 11 employees, is all white walls and deep-blue accents, light pouring in from the Crittall-style windows. On an exposed brick wall at one end of the room, trademark blue-and-white spines are lined up in rows, while in the small, bare meeting room, coloured Post-Its stuck on a wall denote the year’s publishing schedule: non-fiction, fiction, poetry, classics. Outside, over the railway line, sits Bold Tendencies, the multistorey car park turned cultural hub where Fitzcarraldo holds its annual party each summer.

Testard’s gravitas echoes across the house – although sometimes this effect seems almost accidental. “Can we do that?”, O’Meara recalls wondering when Testard first suggested taking the name Fitzcarraldo from Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about an opera-loving fanatic rampaging around the Peruvian jungle. Tamara Sampey-Jawad, associate publisher, was taken aback when she arrived in 2016 as part-time publishing assistant, and Testard announced to her cheerfully: “It’s just me!” Clare Bogen, publicity director, says that before she joined, she had an image of Fitzcarraldo being “like, 20 posh men wearing suits to work”. 

This perception is indisputably linked to the house style. Back in 2011, Testard co-founded a literary journal in order to publish the new fiction and essays in which he was most interested. The White Review aimed to create a platform for innovative work that might not otherwise find a place at the table – including work in translation (“for me, it was a given”, he says). The art director was O’Meara. When he subsequently built the design for Fitzcarraldo, he knew he wanted a visual identity that would bring a sense of clarity and coherence; “a still point within the commerce”, as he puts it. There would be no images or endorsement quotes on the front of the books; simply identifying colours – blue for fiction, cream for non-fiction – and a blind stamp colophon of a bell in a circle, a nod to the speech from the bell tower in the film Fitzcarraldo, a scene that struck O’Meara for its “will and value”. The decision to use French-flapped B-format covers on uncoated card was partly pragmatic (“we just didn’t have the money for hardbacks”) but it also recalls the singular aesthetic of fabled European publishing houses such as Éditions Gallimard and Adelphi Edizioni. 

Sales reps immediately told them it was too extreme. “I had a wobble,” says Testard. “And Ray said, ‘Let’s keep that in mind’ – and also probably something along the lines of: ‘never listen to salespeople’.” But the booksellers liked the books, and they liked the design. “And then they did what Ray hoped might happen, which was to put the books together in displays – create spaces for Fitzcarraldo.”

In June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU, with 64 per cent of over-65s in favour of leaving. This year, a poll of Gen Z likely to vote in a second referendum showed 71 per cent would vote to rejoin. During that decade, literature in translation experienced an extraordinary uplift in the UK. In 2025, sales of translated fiction were up more than 30 per cent from 2016, according to a survey by NielsenIQ BookData. And its readers are younger, with the largest share bought by those aged 25 to 34. “There is an incredible generational divide,” agrees Testard. “I think that it probably is a reaction to Brexit and to this inward turn in British politics and culture, and a desire to be open to the world.” 

Literature has in fact become big and fashionable business in recent years: BookTok champions reading marathons; Miu Miu has a “Literary Club”; next month Dua Lipa curates the London Literature Festival. Fitzcarraldo’s own events feature an earnest, tattooed crowd, comfortable with references to Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes dropped in alongside Fleabag, the financial crisis and the problems of gentrification. Does Testard mind that their covers, tote bags and pin badges have become a shorthand for the hipster aesthetic? “I mean, if it helps, that’s fine.”

The editors at Fitzcarraldo like to compare its list to a constellation – the idea being that each text may be linked to another, with the books “kind of in conversation”, says Sampey-Jawad. One author will recommend another, or a member of staff might make a suggestion (Bogen, who grew up partly in New Zealand, argued “quite forcefully” for Janet Frame’s inclusion in the classics list). Sampey-Jawad says that frequently there’s just “a real sense of ‘this might not find another home’.” Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond had been rejected by a number of bigger publishers who advised that the narrative should be more conventional. Published by Fitzcarraldo in 2015, it remains one of its bestsellers.

“I think mainstream publishing is quite short-sighted,” says Testard. “There are all these brilliant writers of literary fiction who are just not getting the support they were 20 or 30 years ago. We’re part of a movement of smaller indie presses who have maybe benefited from the commercial imperatives bigger presses are having to follow.”

American writer Joshua Cohen had published three novels with Penguin Random House, but in 2020 the publisher turned down his latest. Cohen’s editor had left, and the sales of his previous novel hadn’t been strong enough to automatically take on the next book. His agent submitted it to 12 or so other US publishing houses; they all passed. Testard – who had published Cohen at The White Review, and his two previous books at Fitzcarraldo – did accept the novel. When the American rights were eventually acquired by New York Review Books, The Netanyahus won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. How could a Pulitzer winner be turned down by so many publishers? “It was an odd moment,” says Testard diplomatically. Similarly, Zone had done very well in France, but before Testard, “no one was willing to take the risk”. But art is, for many writers, by definition about risk-taking. As Jonathan Buckley, whose One Boat was listed for the Booker Prize last year, says, “I’ve never written books in order to make money or make a name for myself. I just want to write the books that I feel I have to write.”

At Fitzcarraldo, “it is always about the text”, says Testard. “If we’re interested, we will discuss it in literary terms. Then the financial, commercial stuff comes later. What we do – what we set out to do – is to provide a home for writers for life. We enter into this kind of unspoken contract long-term, giving the writers permission to write whatever they want to publish, and we’ll support them through the process.” This is corroborated by the writers. “As an editor, Jacques never imposes himself on the text,” says Buckley. “It is always a conversation.” Latronico remembers his “astonishment” when Testard responded to his future ideas – “hazy, niche… with no commercial prospects whatsoever, [with] unwavering encouragement and curiosity”. 

But what does this mean for growth? The average print run has risen from 1,500 copies to a minimum of 4,000; only one book has sold fewer than 1,000 copies (Testard adds with pride that in the UK the average novel sells around 300). The backlist is strong, containing five of the 10 bestsellers last year. They are expanding the audio division and aim to extend the number of languages they translate from. This year they will publish 34 books; Testard says it’s enough. Instead, the intention is what he calls – “quite morbidly” – the “final form”: a team of 12, publishing around 30 books a year. “If you tip over into too many then you start having to think about what book is going to sell 50,000 copies that year and fund the rest of the list, and make decisions for commercial reasons.” But most businesses do make decisions for commercial reasons, don’t they? “That doesn’t feel like a healthy way to go.” Are there any conditions under which he’d consider selling the company – being acquired by a bigger publisher? “No.”

Out of the 200 or so books Fitzcarraldo has published, Testard has edited, he thinks, more than half. What drives him? “Just the books,” he says apologetically. “I know, it’s kind of a lame answer. But I still feel really excited reading new work, or a new book by an author we already publish.

“I’m acutely aware that these things are cyclical,” he continues, “and probably soon we won’t be cool, and that’s fine. You know, we’ll just carry on doing what we do.”

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