HUP Director George Andreou on how to Read, Write, Edit & Publish

 George Andreou was appointed director of the Harvard University Press (HUP) in September, 2017 replacing William P. Sisler who had been in the position for some 27 years.

Born in New York, Andreou spent much of his early childhood in Greece. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a degree in English literature and languages. Prior to coming to Harvard he was senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf where he founded Vintage Español, an imprint created to publish books in Spanish for the U.S. market. Over the years he edited the works of many impressive writers, including John Ashbery, Junot Díaz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and the Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk.

I sat down with George recently at his HUP offices in Cambridge, MA, to discuss, among other things, the practice of reading; the role of the editor; the temporality of writing, "what to say, what not to say, and when;" reading books at the right time; editors becoming publishers, the differences between university and trade publishing; peer review; book design; and Thomas Piketty's new book Capital and Ideology.