Nine years young, Jacques Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions—named after Werner Herzog’s film about a quixotic dreamer—has already published four of the last nine Nobel Prize winners, five if you count Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, whose Nobel was won before she was published by Testard. This is something none of the world’s publishing giants have achieved.
Testard was born in France but has lived in London since he was five. In 2011, he set up The White Review, a cult literary journal that published the then unknown Sally Rooney and Julia Armfield. After being told he was overqualified for a first publishing job, he set up Fitzcarraldo in 2014 from a kitchen table in Deptford.
