German in the UK

Meike Ziervogel, publisher When the children were small, my husband and I used to put them into the buggie and onto their pushbikes and walk the streets of London with Peter Ackroyd’s London Biography in hand, the best book for making sense of London’s history. Now I spend many rainy Sundays at football, cricket or tennis tournaments cheering my children on.

I’ve lived here since 1987 (with a couple of years in between in Egypt and Paris) and don’t want to live anywhere else. London is such an exciting, vibrant city. So I don’t really feel homesick. However, if I want to be reminded of Germany, I cook 'Königsberger Klopse'.

I love Tate Modern and any exhibition there is a must-see for me. At the moment they are showing “Gauguin The Maker of Myth” (until January 2011). A fascinating study about how little of reality and how much of his very own mythology Gauguin depicted in his paintings.

As the publisher of Peirene Press I only publish books I personally admire. In September we brought out Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius. A fascinating portrayal of a “typical” young German woman in Rome in 1943, beautifully written and brilliantly translated.