Interview #174 — Radhiah Chowdhury

by Camha Pham

Radhiah Chowdhury is a Muslim Bangladeshi-Australian author and editor living on unceded Bidjigal Land in Sydney’s West. She is currently a commissioning editor and senior audiobook producer at PRH Australia. Her most recent picture book, The Katha Chest, was published by Allen & Unwin in April 2021.

Radhiah Chowdhury spoke to Camha Pham about surviving hostile environments, courage, and exit fees.

You currently work as a commissioning editor and audiobook producer at Penguin Random House. What do these roles entail?

Let me start by saying that my commissioning role shouldn’t exist. The idea of airlifting in a POC to commission other POCs, rather than requiring all publishers and commissioning editors to change their acquiring and publishing practice is—to put it bluntly—fucking ridiculous, bordering on offensive. We don’t need to be cordoned off into a special area, and to do so immediately devalues our contribution to culture by suggesting that we can’t sit at the big table. I will also own to feeling inordinately pressured to say yes to the work because I knew that the alternative was that Australian publishing would continue business-as-usual and even an infinitesimal cultural change would be off the table.

Officially, my commissioning role entails seeking out underrepresented voices and developing them towards publication. There’s a great deal of flexibility and freedom in it at present—I have no targets to meet, and the luxury of unlimited development time to work with writers. Both of these things are immeasurably important, given that FNPOC authors are held to a standard in acquisition conversations that their white peers are not limited by. It’s crucial therefore to have the time and space not only to get a project into the best possible shape to get past an acquisitions meeting, but also for a writer to get a sense of what an editorial relationship with me looks like before they’re locked into it.

As for audio, that’s a continuation of the role I was in before moving into commissioning. It’s the role that I would have stayed in if I were left alone to do as I pleased, rather than feeling compelled to make a decision for a greater good. It’s pure impulse and pleasure, creatively engaging with books without having to engage in books, and I think of it as the Valium that helps me push through the crushing emotional labour of the commissioning role.

Publishing itself is a difficult industry to get into, particularly as a POC. Can you tell us about how you got started in publishing?

I came to publishing from another majority-white, impenetrable, and unnavigable industry, which perhaps has contributed to my tolerance for hostile work environments. I used to be an academic in the English department at Sydney Uni, first as a PhD student and then as a sessional educator. After five years working from casual contract to casual contract—the binfire of the humanities in Australia is well-documented—I decided it was time to move on before I began to regret the impulsive curiosity that had guided me through the lonely labour of a PhD.

I spent eight months unemployed and applied for over forty editorial jobs at a variety of print and online publishers. Eventually, a friend who had undergone a similar torturous professional rebirth recommended that I remove my PhD qualification from my CV. That was incredibly painful to do, but lo and behold, the very first job I applied for with just a BA against my name was a successful application. It says a lot about our publishing industry—not to mention our national culture's highly troubled relationship with education—that my being 'overqualified' coupled with my identifiably non-white name, was the barrier for entry into a dogsbody assistant role.

Wrapped into this journey is a mother lode of privilege, particularly a family situation that enabled me to live with my parents throughout my unemployment, and more than half a decade of a sub-55k publishing salary—not to mention the privilege of having the wherewithal to trek from Campbelltown out to Sydney's lower North Shore (a 3- to 4-hour round trip) in order to work in this industry.

Mainstream publishing houses have sometimes been hostile places for FNPOC writers who often get placed under the ‘diverse’ umbrella and expected to perform their Otherness as a marketing tool. In terms of your commissioning role, you’ve said that the biggest challenge has been to ask ‘[FNPOC] writers to entrust their work and themselves to me’. How do you work to build this trust?

I’ll come out and say that they’ve always been hostile places for FNPOC writers. However much goodwill there may be for a writer of colour, this ecosystem is not built for us, and at some point in the life of a book, an FNPOC writer is going to come up against a wall of whiteness that will leave a mark. I guarantee it.

That’s not to say that FNPOC writers shouldn’t be published by mainstream houses, or even to suggest that the ecosystem will change on a macro level (it should, but I remain sceptical as to whether it actually will). A fundamental difference between a good and bad publishing experience for an FNPOC writer is how those collisions with whiteness are handled. If a writer is left to manage the situation alone, it’s heartbreaking and isolating. If they choose to bring it to the attention of their publisher, is that publisher (or publicist or whoever) equipped to actually help process the situation? And I don’t mean making outraged noises, apologising profusely and being generally sorry and upset. I’m talking about actually seeing the pain, understanding it, and sharing it. Any other response, no matter how well intentioned, inevitably flattens the experience and emphasises to the writer that they’re an alien in this landscape.

So when it comes to the trust of FNPOC writers, I try to start from a place of honesty, vulnerability and empathy. My development process is designed for the development of a writer as well as their work. We have frank conversations about why both of us are doing this work in the first place. Whenever I’m asked whether PRH/Australian publishing at large are going to do right by a writer (and I get asked this a lot), my answer is that I cannot guarantee anything else, but I will commit to doing my utmost to advocate for my writers and, at the bare minimum, listen to their concerns and acknowledge them as real. Underlying it all is an acknowledgement that I can talk about trust all I like, but I also need to show trust by putting my skin in the game. When I say ‘honesty’, I do mean warts-and-all honesty.

In your 2020 Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship report ‘It’s hard to be what you can’t see: diversity within Australian publishing’, you list a number of recommendations to build a more inclusive and representative publishing industry. In your opinion, which of these recommendations do you see as most critical/urgent? How likely are we to see a more equitable and sustainable industry in the near future?

The greatest urgency is changing the composition of the industry itself, because it’s the scaffold needed for most other changes to occur. We need more FNPOC distributed throughout whole companies, particularly in leadership roles where they make actual decisions about the day-to-day and the overall culture of a company. It alleviates the burden of representation from one or two FNPOC staff and it encourages a plurality of voices—because we are not one monolith, we don’t speak for the whole body, and creative dissent is an important element to understanding the multiplicity of perspectives and stories that this industry needs to prioritise representing. It makes it that much more likely that the white cultural biases of publishing houses are challenged on a regular basis when it comes to company practice as well as company output. It also means that FNPOC authors are more likely to have allies within a company who fundamentally understand that their experience and needs are not the same as their white peers. Change the people gatekeeping the stories, and the stories we’re telling will change as a result.

Senior FNPOC staff also give juniors something to aspire to, as well as presenting invaluable opportunities for mentoring and peer support. What I’m really saying here is that our white peers have to make space for FNPOC staff at all levels—even if those peers have been waiting for longer for promotion, waiting their ‘turn’, and all the other petty long-term violences that are enacted on so many people in our industry.

And this is directly related to how likely I think we are to see an equitable and sustainable industry within our lifetimes. I am not at all optimistic that it’s going to happen, because it requires people with power and privilege to sacrifice them for the sake of an abstract cause without any promise of a measurable return or reward. Every time anything relating to the inequality of this—or any— industry comes up, we never seem to be able to get past re-litigating whether racism even exists. We can’t even get the powerful majority in this industry to really agree (I’m not counting PR lip service) that representative publishing has any value, let alone convince them to give up some of their power to make space for us. I acknowledge it’s a massive ask, but that’s kind of the point—there can be no equity without the powerful ceding some power. It’s killed me to see how many indie presses and new imprints have been launched over the past 18 months, helmed by white people, of course, with the opportunity to actually do something better and change the game. Each one has actively chosen to keep on doing the same old shit.

So I don’t think change is coming on that level, no. The change I’m invested in is making this hostile landscape better, safer, more survivable for us. I’m increasingly convinced that the way to do this is to create our own spaces in which we can thrive. I’m dying to see more FNPOC indie publishers and booksellers in Australia so that we can serve the rich pool of FNPOC writers this country persists in erasing. I’m in awe of the work that Magabala Books has done and continues to do, and can only imagine how valuable a resource they are for First Nations writers. I want to pour our resources into building and supporting these sorts of initiatives, rather than breaking our bodies against the big machinery of an existing industry that honestly couldn’t give a fuck about us unless we can be exploited for their bottom line.

You have also authored two children’s books and your PhD was on fairy tales and children’s literature. How did your interest in children’s literature come about? What are your thoughts on the notion of children’s books being ‘easy’ to write?

I’ve always been most drawn to children’s stories, but I can’t actually remember what sent me down that path in my professional life. They’ve always been the stories with the strongest power, and I believe wholeheartedly that children’s storytelling is the frontline of actual cultural change. A well-crafted children's book will foster a lifelong love of reading, just as a steady diet of dross will stunt a child's cultural appetite. I know I’m biased as an author, but it’s what absolutely kills me about Australia’s bottomless appetite for shitty (literally) books by local celebrities, because they consume so much of the oxygen in an already limited market and actively box out the important, meaningful storytelling that needs to be done. We’ve got this immense privilege and access to the next generation before they’re warped by the world we live in, yet we squander it with fart books.

A good picture book is a symphony of visual literacy and textual lyricism, whether it’s a moving meditation on death or a fun romp about a cranky bear. Editing a picture book is a very specific art form that very few people actually excel in, and I was exceptionally lucky to learn it from someone whom I genuinely consider the best in this country. Older books—junior fiction through to YA—are all about carefully mediating the complex heart of a story within the limitations of the audience, basically assembling a ship in a bottle. If writing a children’s book seems easy to someone, it’s probably because they’re writing a bad book!

If a writer is left to manage the situation alone, it’s heartbreaking and isolating. If they choose to bring it to the attention of their publisher, is that publisher (or publicist or whoever) equipped to actually help process the situation?

As a friend and colleague, I am struck by and admire your courage to voice your opinions on matters of inclusion and diversity. In an industry as small and predominately white as publishing, speaking out as a POC can have professional consequences. Where does this courage come from?

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on what constitutes courage. I don’t consider what I do courageous; it’s nihilism. I’m not trying for false modesty when I say that I have genuinely, over the course of a decade, simply run out of fucks to give, and have the privilege of knowing that if things deteriorate past a certain point, I can walk away. Publishing thrives on the impression that the people who work in it are lucky to be there and should be grateful to ‘do something they love’, and apparently asking for a living wage and decent working conditions is a bridge too far. To some extent, that’s true, because in the false economy the industry has created, for every one person who calls time and resigns, there are twenty starry-eyed people waiting to take their place. It’s a toxic relationship with every bad ex you’ve ever had.

But I also resist any approbations about courage because I still police my tone and play respectability politics in professional settings in order to not upset the white majority so much that they completely stop listening to what I’m saying. Talking up to the white gatekeepers is a skill we all develop if we’re going to survive in their world. I’ve been in full-ugly tears and still spent the bulk of my speaking time praising white egos for being on the right path, so that they stay on that path. If I speak the unvarnished truth, the reality is that I'll be discounted as an angry brown woman, and any esoteric offence I might have given will be used as an excuse to stop trying to do better altogether. I haven’t ever unleashed the face-melting extent of my rage and told my white peers what I really think despite their fragile feelings. I actually think I waste far too much time propping up white egos and catering to their comforts whenever I’m given a platform.

What advice do you have for others in the industry who may not feel as safe speaking up?

I’m extraordinarily privileged to have a fiercely passionate mentor in my day job, and she‘s done nothing but protect, support, and empower me to speak up in every context. Even with allies and mentors, of course, everyone’s on their own journey and can only do what’s possible for them. But for what it’s worth, I offer two pieces of advice:

First, understand that sometimes silence is powerful, and sometimes it isn’t. It’s important to work out where the balance tips for you, and think about what you need to do to maintain your own power. There's no shortage of people ready to silence us; we don't need to help them do it.

Second, I highly recommend everyone privately assess their limits and quantifiably set their boundaries. What measurable things do you want to achieve in a role, and where is the line in the sand that you refuse to cross? What is your exit strategy? It's helped me a lot in recent years to be empirical about what I won't tolerate in a job, and what things I want to achieve before I start looking for the exits. And there is always an exit, though what you're prepared to pay as an exit fee for safe passage is something only you can determine.

For myself, this industry has given me an eating disorder, four bouts of severe depression, long stints on some noxious medications, and an anxiety disorder. I have cried more tears over my various publishing jobs than I have over anything else in my life. And for what? Who, ultimately, gains anything from my self-destruction from caring so much about how my work and workplace impacts the world? It’s certainly not me. After ten years of this garbage, I know my limit. I won’t bleed for this industry any longer. 2020 forced some hard decisions about how sustainable this work is, particularly when I felt compelled into a role I didn’t actually want to be in. I literally wrote down the specific conditions I needed met in order to keep working in publishing without damaging my health further. If any of those conditions changes, I’ve committed to walking away, no excuses. The note is stuck to my sister’s fridge, because she loves snacking and holding me accountable.

I am curious about your childhood and where you grew up and what impact your past has had on your present. Can you tell us a little about your upbringing?

I’m from a classically high-achieving South Asian family, littered with doctors, engineers and finance people. It’s every stereotype of middle-class desi life that you can imagine. But we’re also a family—like so many migrants—with a great deal of cultural trauma buried deep, particularly from the Bangladesh War of Independence. It’s wrapped up with a fierce protective commitment to language and culture because that was what the occupiers tried to take from us.

Dad was very clear that in this country, we would need to fight tooth and nail to achieve basic milestones because we weren’t white. He never accepted anything less than perfection because he was convinced that’s what it would take for us to get a foot in the door: be the absolute best at a thing, and then nobody can ignore or discount you. The work ethic was an excellent thing to learn, but the toxic fallacy he never understood—and took me a long time to understand myself—was that you can work to be the best and still be overlooked. Gold star effort does not guarantee gold star results.

My parents are from two highly diasporic families, and within the first 10 years of their marriage moved from Bangladesh to Canada, Singapore and Armidale. I spent my first sentient years in country NSW, in the bosom of a vibrant migrant community from all over the world who had settled in Armidale to work and study at the university there. There was no inkling in all this time that my family or I were somehow intrinsically different from other Australians—we all looked different, but we were one community, celebrating Christmas, Eid, Diwali, and Purim every year in town-wide gatherings. It was a migrant experience of Australia seen through the eyes of a child, and though I’m sure there were the usual tensions and politics between different groups, I had no awareness of it and led a charmed life, tagging along with Mum to CWA sewing days, baking days, and country fairs.

We moved to greater western Sydney when I was seven, where we were one of four South Asian families for miles. I suddenly felt more invisible and strange, and learned very quickly what it was to be an outsider in the place you call home. I started disavowing my heritage because it actively stood in the way of integrating with my peers at school. I was in Year 12 when the planes hit the twin towers, and sixteen is a very fragile age to learn that you can scrub yourself of your heritage as hard as you like, but it won’t stop your peers from turning on you in a heartbeat when your points of difference are brought to their attention. Distancing yourself from the communities who can empathise with your experiences certainly won’t keep you safe.

What are some of your earliest memories of literature? Do you remember your first experience of seeing yourself reflected in a book?

Armidale had an extraordinary public library. The children’s librarian pushed all sorts of stories into my hands: Enid Blyton, Frog and Toad, CS Lewis, Andrew Lang’s fairy tales, Diana Wynne Jones, E Nesbit, Winnie the Pooh. Campbelltown Library, once we got to Sydney, had a great collection and a forgiving attitude to late fees. Throughout the isolation and Otherness of the move to Sydney, I kept reading, so many stories from so many writers. I rarely saw myself in these books (not positively, anyway), but like so many other readers from minority communities, I became extremely good at reading myself into stories and characters not designed for me.

I distinctly remember my first experience of seeing myself in a book. I was eight. It was The Horse and His Boy, and the character was Aravis, one of CS Lewis’s racist 'Calormene' caricatures of Turkish and Arab culture in his Chronicles of Narnia. Bear in mind that I am neither Turkish nor Arab. But she was the closest character I’d ever met at that point. Aravis is essentially a villain as long as she remains attached to her culture, and the only way she can become the heroine of the story is to have her skin literally flayed from her back and then utterly reject her heritage to adopt the culture of the white man she marries. I’ve thought about what lasting effect this literary encounter has had on my life a lot over the years.

You’ve mentioned that you have considered leaving the Australian publishing industry on a couple of occasions. What is it that makes you stay?

It’s exceptionally hard to walk away from something that you believe matters. In the past, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that even if it was one book at a time, I could be impacting literary culture in some microscopic way. Because I do think the stories we tell matter. My beef is with the industry that controls those stories, not the idea of storytelling itself. There’s also my gut-churning understanding that if I do walk away, that’s one less POC advocating in this white space, particularly at the middle-level I occupy. I’m also really conscious of the number of people who have been interacting with ‘diversity in publishing’ in recent years because it’s a zeitgeist niche, and that fills me with terror. Because if those of us wholeheartedly working in the inclusive publishing space keep burning out, we’re leaving the field clear to the opportunists who will then define the conversation. We’re leaving writers of colour at the mercy of those opportunists and exploitative publishing houses. It’s been difficult to square that with my conscience. I basically haven’t been able to pay the exit fee.

Who are you inspired by?

You. I can’t tell you what it’s meant to know you these past 12+ months, and I’m immeasurably grateful that you reached out to make contact. Grace Lucas-Pennington is another simply incredible human and I’m staggered by the work she’s doing and what it means to Blak writers and editors in this country.

I’m also inspired by the people who have been working in inclusive publishing for years upon years both here and in the UK, because it is a hustle and a shitfight at the best of times, and nevertheless they persist. None of the work I’ve tried to do would have been possible without the scaffolding of the teams at Diversity Arts Australia or Spread the Word UK.

I’m most inspired by the FNPOC creatives who are flourishing in this country despite everything—organisations like Story Factory and BPS, publications like LIMINAL and Voiceworks, and all the amazing writers and artists who are carving out spaces to create important, beautiful work. It’s my immense privilege to engage within such a thriving, multifaceted creative scene that refuses to be defined by the limitations of our white cultural industries.

What are you currently listening to?

For music, it’s been a lot of Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi mixed with a lot of ’80s and ’90s diva pop. My two settings are uber-chill or shrieking pop anthems.

In audiobooks, I’m halfway through Afua Hirsch’s We Need to Talk about the British Empire and Mariah Carey’s memoir (highly, HIGHLY recommend—she narrates it herself).

In podcasts, my two current mainstays are Keep It (Crooked Media) and This Being Human (Aga Khan Museum), as well as revisiting old seasons of Revisionist History (Panoply/Pushkin).

What are you currently reading?

This is always a loaded question for anyone working in publishing! Where do you draw the line between work and play? Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is open on my desktop. Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy Snow Bird is on my bedside table. Alisha Rai’s The Right Swipe is on my old Kobo which I’ve lost the charger for. I’ve been re-reading my favourite Georgette Heyers on the weekends.

How do you practise self-care?

Making time for important friends. I’m an introvert by nature, and between work and my dislike of putting on pants and leaving the house, it’s very easy to go for long stretches without seeing the people who matter to you, and know what matters to you. With calendar commitments for interstate Zoom chats, theatre days, shared WFH days and Friday-morning swims, I usually manage to see the core people on a semi-regular basis and vent off some of the pressure that builds throughout the week. Diva pop also helps.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

I spent a long time thinking it was a limitation on who I could be in this world, and as much time unlearning that way of thinking. I’m still figuring it out.