Two minds meeting: Jan Mark and Jon Appleton

Writers and publishers have traditionally shared close working relationships, but few publishers have had such a long and formative relationship with a writer as Jon Appleton had with the British novelist, short-story writer and teacher Jan Mark. Jon began corresponding with Jan when he was a child in Australia, and as we’ll hear, Jan was instrumental in his ambition to become a publisher, an ambition which he fulfilled when he moved to England in the 1990s. A tired old cliché warns us against meeting our heroes, but from the 1990s until Jan’s death in January 2006, Jon and Jan remained close friends and occasional collaborators. Jon is now one of Jan’s literary executors and, as well as pursuing his own career as a writer and freelance publisher, he has been re-publishing some of Jan’s most challenging and interesting books in digital formats and has recently created the website https://janmark.net, which he describes as ‘the hub for all things Jan’. At the time of this interview, Jon was compiling The One That Got Away (Mark 2020), a major retrospective collection of Jan’s short stories which was published in 2020.