Last week I had the chance to meet with Maria-Carolina Cambre, author of our forthcoming Semiotics of Che Guevara. She was in London courtesy of her winning a prize, and we always like to shout about it when our authors win prizes for being excellent. Her book is part of our Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics series, about which you can find more details here.
The prize is the 2013 Rieger Award for Thesis/Disseration and it was awarded for Maria-Carolina's work on 'The Politics of the Face: Manifestations of Che Guevara's Image and Its Collage of Renderings and Agency'. There are more details here.
Maria-Carolina took me through her ideas for the book and we also spoke about how she could edit her manuscript to make it more readable and compelling. I am a firm believer that academic discourse is written to inform but also to entertain. When an academic or a student parts with their money and takes receipt of a book from my list, I want them to learn something (hopefully whatever they bought to book to learn) but also to feel as if they are getting some kind of entertainment. There is no real reason why an academic book can't have good prose, clear writing and, even, an arc to the 'narrative', such as it is. Constructing a book with 80,000 words leaves plenty of room to make sure that you are enriching someone's daily lived experience when they read your work. Authors take their readers from one point of knowledge to the next and that is movement, of a sort: what this movement needs is structure.
We finished up our coffees at the very chic Store Street Espresso and M-C headed off. You can hear her talk about her work in this pod cast, hosted by the Toronto Review of Books.
Also: if you're writing an academic book and you want guidance on structure and style, why not get in touch?
GM.
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