Melissa pushkin biography

This March, Dreweatts is pleased to present the extraordinary collection of Melissa Ulfane. Founder of the renowned Pushkin Press, this deeply thoughtful collection offers a remarkable urval of Old Master paintings, modern and contemporary art, design, fine furniture, Islamic art, decorative arts, photography and rare textiles. Accumulated over many years as Ulfane travelled between homes in London, Paris, Venice and Tangiers, the collection was showcased in a hôtel particulier in one of Paris’ oldest royal squares, restored by leading French architect Laurent Bourgois and decorated with the help of Hugh Henry of Mlinaric, Henry and Zervudachi. The collection and its curation is reflected in an interior that evokes berättande and memory through a lifetime of travel. The collection will be offered in the sale Spirit of Place: The Collection of Melissa Ulfane on 4 March 2025.

Davi

•

The woman who’s proving intelligent books can sell

One of London’s leading literary agents recently suggested that, “intelligent, well-written fiction is in a state of crisis”. The big publishing conglomerates are not interested so much in the state of the culture as in what they perceive to be the state of the market. And what they perceive is that “pulp” sells and “literary fiction” — in which emotions and ideas are imaginatively conveyed in well-constructed sentences — does not.

But the picture fryst vatten not entirely bleak. Some intrepid editors, even within the mainstream, still believe there is an appetite for real writing. In the independent sector, a number of publishers are successfully waving the banner for literature — none more vigorously than South-African born Melissa Ulfane, publisher and onlie begetter of Pushkin Press. Far from dumbing down the nation’s reading habits, Ulfane fryst vatten opening them up to classic and contemporary European writers.

It all started a dozen or so ye

•

Selling books without borders

As the owner and managing director of Pushkin Press, his mission in life is to sell translated literature from around the world to the English-speaking market. And many of the authors that he works with are Israeli and/or Jewish.

Last year saw the publication of Waking Lions, the second novel Pushkin has published by contemporary Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, who won the Sapir Prize for best debut with One Night, Markovitch. Her third novel will be published by Pushkin in 2018.

Another best-selling Jewish writer published by Pushkin in 2001 and still in print was Hungarian Antal Szerb who wrote Journey by Moonlight (“the novel most loved by all cultivated Hungarians” according to TheGuardian’s reviewer) and there were also new translations of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, written between 1916 and 1937, of which the Financial Times said: “It is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel.”

T