A Conversation with Frances Pinter: Promoting Intellectual and Political Freedom Through Publishing

Lea Greenberg: Well, to begin, tell me about what first brought you to the field of publishing.

Frances Pinter: I was in London working on a PhD with American citizenship, wondering what I was going to do with my life. And I didn’t think I really wanted to be an academic, but I had a history of organizing things. As an undergraduate at NYU, I organized demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and student newspapers. And somebody said, “You’d be good in publishing, and it’s a job where there’s so much organization.” That appealed to me, but it also has the intellectual content.

LG: So, it’s not only about organization, but your background in activism also informed your trajectory. What were some of the first projects in publishing you pursued?

FP: I was twenty-three when I met a young Ugandan Asian academic who had been teaching in Kampala while finishing up his PhD at Harvard. Ugandan Asians were being scapegoated by the dictator Idi Amin for the crashed economy, and they were being expelled. And so, this young man found himself suddenly in a refugee center in London with his parents and siblings.

His story moved me greatly. I suggested he write a short book on his experiences. He said he didn’t know how to find a publisher. I didn’t either. But on the spur of the moment I said, “I’ll tell you what—I’ll set up a publishing company to publish your book.” He wrote the book in three weeks; I set up the company Pinter Publishers in three weeks. Three months later, we published the book From Citizen to Refugee. Against all odds, it became a success! It even got reviewed in the London Sunday Times.

Many years later, an Indian filmmaker stumbled upon the book and decided she must meet the author. They met, fell in love, married, and had a son. And that son is now mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani! I tell this story to illustrate serendipity and the power of the written word!

LG: What an unexpected connection! Indeed, publishing is so much about chance encounters. I’m interested to hear then what spurred the establishment of CEU Press.

FP: I was still running Pinter Publishers in the early nineties, which was a mid-sized, mission-driven social science press. I got a phone call from the head of the academic division of Oxford University Press, who said, “We’ve just had lunch with a man called George Soros, and he says he’s starting a university and he thinks he needs a university press. But it’s been about 500 years since we set up OUP. We have no idea how you start a press. So, we’ve sent him to you because we know you set up a press within living memory.” A few hours later, George Soros phoned and asked if I would come see him.

So, I did. I went to his house in London. We spent two hours disagreeing about how to publish books. And then a few months later, he asked me to do a business plan, which I wasn’t expecting. And then I presented it to the Central European University Senate; they approved it, and I set it up. I was still in London running my company, but I hired a small team and set up a very small press in Budapest.

LG: And what was it like building a press during such a tumultuous time politically?

FP: My vision for it was to set up a Western-style, small university press covering a broad range of topics with a broad range of authors. But the local Hungarian members of the board had a different vision. They wanted the press to build a corpus of hitherto unknown knowledge of the region. They wanted to bring in authors who had been banned or were so controversial that they couldn’t actually publish prior to the regime changes, and they really had this vision of a collection of books which would fill the gaps of knowledge about the region.

And I have to say, and I have said all along for many years now, that they were right and I was wrong. And I’m glad that we actually did it the way they wanted it done. So, it was kept small and distinct, and we put a lot of work into the manuscripts and helped the authors create the kinds of works that would speak to audiences around the world about the region.

LG: In many ways, we try to maintain that legacy now, but of course a lot has changed. Looking back at the development of CEU Press, what are you most proud of regarding the press? What makes it special?

FP: Yes, an awful lot has changed. What am I most proud of? Well, it’s actually the caliber of the books, the prizes that they won, and the careers that they helped launch and build. Many of the authors that we published have taken positions all around the world and are making important contributions to critical thought. As a social scientist, I have found books like Bálint Magyar’s book Post-Communist Mafia State to be really interesting, and we published a number of books by him that have actually taken on the issues around a hostile and autocratic government. So, I think that’s pretty special. Another thing is that the press now has an amazing group of editors who really, really care about the mission. I think that’s essential for a press like ours—that the editors really care.

LG: And as we continue to look forward, what is something that you hope to see or continue seeing from CEU Press in the future?

FP: I hope that the commissioning editors, like you, will commission works that are at the cutting edge of our thinking about what makes democracy work. What do we need to do to preserve our freedoms, our intellectual freedoms, and our political freedoms? We really need a complete overhaul in our thinking about this because just harking back to the thoughts of the writers of the Enlightenment is not going to cut it in this world that we live in.

I know we’re committed to Open Access, and I’d like to see the press doing more as Open Access. The Opening the Future program is one of those models that is taking hold, and it seems to me a no-brainer that we have to do as much in Open Access as possible in a financially sustainable way.

LG: And ultimately, I think those themes that you discussed—the core parts of our research and our mission, such as open societies and democracy—dovetail with the other work that you have been doing. Since you are stepping away from CEU Press and focusing more on your work with Ukraine, could tell me a bit more about those collaborations and how it also links to your experience with the press?

FP: OK, well back to the nineties: I worked for the Open Society Institute, now the Open Society Foundations. One of the programs we had was a major translation project. We translated classics of the social sciences and humanities of the West into all the languages of the East, in all thirty post-communist countries. And some of the projects were huge. They made a significant impact, and many people have told me it changed their lives. But what if we had been able to publish those books as Open Access so that anybody in those countries could have read them, and not just the academic libraries that held the printed version?

That’s how I became interested in Ukraine. So, when the full-scale invasion happened, I thought: What I can do to help Ukraine? What I came up with was to help develop the relationships between Ukrainian publishers and Western publishers, whether in Europe, the UK, or the US, in this period when they are looking to change their standards to align with the European Union and the European standards. It’s very technical, but basically, it’s building bridges between publishers to make this happen.

So, I set up something called SUPRR and it stands for Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery. It’s been going since 2023, and it’s very much demand driven. We set up webinars with peers, and we’re holding an in-person conference for Ukrainian policymakers on academic publishing in Oxford in 2026.

LG: It sounds like this initiative is very much in sync with the throughline of your career, and that you’re keeping very busy.

FP: I’ve been commissioned to write a history of academic publishing, and I’m late! It feels really odd being on the other side of the fence!

LG: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that book when it’s ready!