Publisher Joëlle Losfeld leaves Gallimard to relaunch her own publishing house

After more than twenty years with the Gallimard group, Joëlle Losfeld, 73, is leaving the publishing group to recreate her own independent structure, she told AFP on Thursday, confirming information from the newspaper Libération.

"I'm not a big fan of big companies and I want to end my professional life by reconnecting with what I started with, that is to say, a small structure where I can publish what I want," she said.

"Not that Gallimard prevented me from publishing what I wanted, but I was confined to novels," she added.

Joëlle Losfeld leaves Gallimard while retaining ownership of her name, which she has never given up, while leaving the publisher to manage her assets.

"We co-manage this catalog together. If Gallimard wants to republish a book or pulp it (destroy it so the paper can be recycled), it will ask my permission," she said.

This new structure, scheduled to launch in early 2026, will be financed in part by a family inheritance. It will be called Terrain Vague-Losfeld, in reference to the name of her first company. "It's the final loop," she believes.

Daughter of the Franco-Belgian publisher Éric Losfeld, founder of the publishing house Le Terrain Vague - famous for its surrealist and erotic publications such as Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan - Joëlle Losfeld took over the reins of the company upon his death in 1979, associating her name with it.

Faced with economic difficulties, she ended this first publishing adventure before founding a publishing house in her own name in 1991. She worked with the Mango group from 1997 to 2003, when her structure became part of Gallimard publishing.

Its catalog, filled with around fifteen titles per year, mixes French and foreign literature and is distinguished by "a marginal perspective carried by an original style and an imagination at the service of literary creation," describes Gallimard on its website.

Joëlle Losfeld has notably contributed to the recognition in France of English-speaking authors such as Janet Frame, John Meade Falkner, Paula Fox, Kate O'Riordan and John Cheever.

In 1999, the unexpected success of Michel Quint's novel Effroyables jardins gave her publishing house new visibility. She was also behind the reissue of the complete works of French-speaking Egyptian writer Albert Cossery, winner of the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 1990.