Glenn Cowley: An appreciation of a South African publisher

Footballers (and author) huddling in an unusual pose – not on the playing field, but around their publisher, Glenn Cowley. The scene – Ike’s Bookshop, Durban, May 2004, just a few days before FIFA awarded South Africa the right to host the 2010 World Cup. Glenn is beaming next to Henry ‘Black Cat’ Cele, the former goalkeeper, at the launch of Peter Alegi’s ‘Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa’. Bald of head, bronzed, tense of movement, rimless spectacles flashing in the light stands the man who transformed University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. During the 11 years (1998–2009) that he ran it, Glenn Cowley turned it from an inconspicuous, sleepy little university publisher – just one among several in post-apartheid, newly democratic South Africa – into a significant force in both scholarly publishing and other serious books with a wider appeal.

Or another glimpse of this very private of men, this one from a lifetime ago. The year, 1966. Senator Bobby Kennedy, wearing the mantle of his murdered brother, President JFK, daring the brutal and clumsy apartheid government of the day to deny entry to the man who looked like being the next United States president. Barnstorming into the country to defy segregation and celebrate liberty, if not liberation. And the young Glenn Cowley, still in his twenties, president of the Students Representative Council of the University of Natal, welcoming him to the campus in Durban. It may sound like just an exciting moment in a student leader’s life, welcoming the ‘big man’ politician. But in South Africa it was an act of courage, and defiance of the whole apartheid system.

So who was this young man? Educated at the exclusive boys school, the Diocesan College, in Cape Town, Glenn Cowley went on to the University of Natal. Like so many sensitive, politically aware and highly able young South Africans of his day, he went overseas – in Glenn’s case, to Harvard in the United States. And he never returned to his native country until the long decades of heroic struggle by so many thousands upon thousands of nameless South Africans eventually broke the will of the regime, and the difficult democratic transition began in the years following Mandela’s release in 1990. In New York, where Glenn settled after graduating, he joined one of America’s largest and most famous publishers, Random House. But after a number of years there, his determination to pursue his own path led him to the courageous decision to set up, with a friend, an independent literary agency in that city. On returning eventually to South Africa, he settled in Johannesburg. There he became involved in the glossy Enterprise magazine which was very much in keeping with the sudden explosion in numbers of the black South African business class. And he also acted as a publishing consultant.

Glenn brought to the University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, when asked to become its publisher in 1998, an unusually broad experience of the world of publishing. Unlike any other South African publisher, he knew the American scene from his long years in New York, and moved easily in international publishing circles. Perhaps the single most important thing he brought to his new role, and where he made the most significant contribution to South African scholarly publishing, was his acute awareness that successful publishing of intellectual books means never letting up on the importance of marketing. Selecting ‘good’ manuscripts or ‘impressive scholars’ as authors is only the beginning; giving a real voice to an author requires attention to the intellectually less glamorous work of marketing. Glenn believed that a university publisher had no secure future as an independent voice unless it abandoned being subsidised by its parent university. This was particularly important in South Africa where financial pressures soon made such self-indulgent funding almost impossible. Instead, he brought to South Africa the lesson of so many successful North American university presses. These, in addition to their scholarly output, often developed a complementary publishing programme that produced high quality, non-fiction ‘trade’ books that reached out to a much wider readership. The books Glenn brought out at UKZN Press on soccer and cricket, as well as history, are good examples of how he translated this strategy into the South African context. And it was this that has given the Press a much more secure financial future, an unprecedented expansion in its scale of operation and a significant trade presence in South African publishing.

I had the pleasure of knowing Glenn at both ends of his life – as a schoolboy all those years ago, and again as a publisher when he regularly travelled overseas and sold rights on his titles to Zed Books and other publishers in the United States and Britain, and also bought books from us for the South African market. I remember with great affection his sense of humour, and trenchant turn of phrase – striking, funny, uncompromisingly clearsighted. He was a very able man, energetic and with all the confidence of having successfully operated in the sharply competitive world of New York publishing. He was comfortable with, and aware of, the new political and intellectual context of democratic South Africa. And like all the best people in publishing, he refused to see books as just another ‘product’ (an attitude large corporations in the publishing world are too often tempted to fall for). Instead, he was a lover of the process in all its aspects, someone who liked and appreciated his authors and a man who valued the place books can play in the unfolding life of a country.

‘Hamba kahle’, Glenn – ‘Go well’. ‘Malume’ (‘Uncle’) not just to the nephews and nieces who loved you greatly, but to a whole number of young South Africans in publishing who learned from you so much of their craft.

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