PVPF 2024

Interview with Gvantsa Jobava, EC member of IPA

Interview with Gvantsa Jobava, EC member of IPA
on Mar 03, 2022

Gvantsa Jobava, born in 1986 in Tbilisi, is the current Deputy Chairperson of the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association. She has an impressive leadership record in the publishing world. She has been the Editor and International Relations Manager at Intelekti Publishing/Artanuji Publishing, one of the biggest publishing houses in Georgia, since 2010. She is a member of the Executive Committee at the International Publishers Association (IPA) and was a 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow.

She has published children’s literature, poetry, and non-fiction, and she is the translator of Saul Bellow and John Lennon from English into Georgian and of Anna Politkovskaya’s ‘Putin’s Russia’ from Russian into Georgian. Her translation of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ was shortlisted for the 2016 SABA literary prize for translation. She is also the Editor, with Becca Parkinson, of an anthology of Georgian short stories in English translation, The Book of Tbilisi (2017). She is one of the managers of Tbilisi’s designation as UNESCO World Book Capital 2021. She was one of the managers with Georgia, being the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018.

Frontlist: Currently, you are the Deputy Chair of the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association. What change have you brought for women in the association?

Gvantsa: I have brought a big change for women in our association. Since 2013, I'm serving in the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association in different positions, and sometimes it has been challenging, very stressful, very emotional, but really beautiful years. Of course, sometimes we fail. But this gives us the strength and huge motivation to wake up the next morning in a very optimistic mood and start fighting for success even harder than before. I'm not sure if I managed to bring any change for our women, but almost every day on any occasion. I'm trying to show them courage and devotion to our work, and also, I'm trying to be brave to make others brave too. And then trying not to get frightened so that others do not fear.

Frontlist: You are a member of the PublisHer community. How do you think it is helping women in the publishing industry?

Gvantsa: I've been a member of the PublisHer since the very beginning when almost three years ago, this community was created in London during the London Book Fair in 2019. I still remember that fantastic Yuning, which I spent with absolutely amazing women publishers from all around the world who appear to be full of enthusiasm and willingness to help and support each other. Even on that very first evening together, while sitting around the dinner tables. In small groups, we started exchanging our stories, experiences, doubts, questions, ideas, everything.We started talking about development and offered our support to each other. On that very first day, I truly realized that it was the start of an amazing movement, which was going to work in real life. That's exactly, what represents women’s power!

Frontlist: What type of plans do you have as an active member of the IPA Executive Committee for the year 2022, especially for women?

Gvantsa: I think that the IPA Executive Committee, especially during the last few years, has shown its clear position and opinion about the huge importance of women empowerment in publishing, by electing two brilliant women publishers on senior positions - Bodour Al Qasimi, we all know her as the President, and also Karina Pansa as the Vice-President of IPA. We want to emphasise that it's time to see more and more hardworking, devoted, highly-professional women publishers in leadership positions. I'm willing to do my best to help keep this course IPA has chosen because a lot is to be done. It's extremely important that IPA as a professional union becomes an example for its members from all around the world. If we go on working on it with the same self-confidence as we are doing it now, thanks to our new leadership, our attempt will have its very logical outcome in different industries as well.

Frontlist: What inspired you to organize the Tbilisi International Book Fair (2013- 2016)?

Gvantsa: This is one of my favorite projects, and the Tbilisi International Book Fair is one of the most important projects of the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association, and this year, we're planning to organize it for the 24th time. It has already become a huge tradition and one of the biggest cultural events in our career. So, being the organizer of this wonderful event together with my fantastic colleagues is a great honor and great pleasure at the same time. Everyone who is involved in the working process feels lucky for being a part of Tbilisi. And, especially before the pandemic, we, of course, used to visit several international book fairs per year and learned a lot from our foreign colleagues. Then we tried our best to use this knowledge to come up with our own book fair and made it attractive, not only for locals but for an international audience as well. And, currently it is the International Book Fair, except traditional book markets and literary events, this is the main platform which hosts more and more foreign publishers and authors with special programs in it. Each year offers its own publishing conference, a new pavilion designed especially for children's books, and very special unique project actors and actresses for literature.

Frontlist: On this International Women’s Day, how do you think you #BreaktheBias (theme of 2022) and how you shall continue to do so?

Gvantsa: If I speak about 2013 when at the age of 27, I became the first Deputy Chair of our association who was not the publisher but the employee of the publishing house. This happened because my boss trusted me, and he sent me to the local PA as his representative to work, to learn to fight. And in two years, I became the chairperson of the association with the help of unbelievable trust and support from my colleagues. However, in the beginning, when I started as a Deputy Chair, my age and occupation was really an issue. And it often happened that I was expected to change my mind or decision to respect someone's age advantage. But if you want to achieve success and gain respect and trust, if you really care about the future development and progress of your entire industry, sometimes you have to make really unpopular decisions, but it's part of any work, and we need to get used to doing it.

Frontlist: It's said that in the Georgian Publishing Industry, women are dominating. Is it true?

Gvantsa: We can, probably women and men both.They should try and work on it a little bit more. And it's really possible because we have in our society a lot of developed people as well, who understand things perfectly and who we can involve in the process to empower women. As for Georgia, I remember that once I was interviewed about this topic already, and I compared the Georgia book industry to the paradise of gender equality, and I'm proud to tell you that after several years from that interview, we still managed to keep the same course. And if we look at the list of our member organizations, the percentage of men and women directors is 50-50 again, and on the association board, we have now six women members and one male member only. And in the association staff, we have only women. Nearly the same is the statistics in other literary organizations operating in Georgia.

According to these statistics, we can easily say that Georgian women are not only dominating but maybe even ruling the Georgia Publishing Industry. It looks like that. So I, of course, wish all other industries to have better statistics in terms of gender equality. And I think that women should work on it. And they should also involve men who have the right views about it, some like popular personalities as well, to work on it to promote this topic in their countries. And a lot to be done, of course, and it's difficult, it's different. According to the different countries, it doesn't work the same way, you know, countries because it depends on the culture and a lot of things. But it is possible. I mean, it's really possible, and it really needs braveness. And it needs hard work, of course.

Frontlist: The PublisHer is completing its 3 years in March 2020. What do you think it has done to #BreaktheBias in the publishing industry and provided viable solutions to the many gender-based inequities that have long characterized the world publishing and the other creative industries?

Gvansta: PublisHer is a unique movement, which makes women's voices be heard. It gives women the stage to be seen and listened, listened to not only by men but by women also, because today, a lot of women in our world needs to hear the true stories, through examples, experiences, about how they manage- firstly, to survive, and then, to become the leaders in our equal society, they need the face that breaks the biases. And if women managed to unite the forces, and if more and more men in this universe start respecting equality, important change can be achieved. They need to believe that the real change starts from each of us. And this is how I say the mission of the publisher.

Frontlist: Today is International Women's Day. What thought would you like to leave for women, coming after you, women, who would want to follow the same footsteps, or follow the same path, that you have walked on in your life ?

Gvansta: Well, I can say that you should be brave, and you should not fear. But you should know that it's a lot of work. We choose our life, and we choose what kind of life we want to live. And if we choose freedom, if we choose independence, then we should know that we need to work and fight for it every day.

In the case of men and women, it's the same because this universe is like these works like this, that if the person and the people want to be free and independent, they should know that it's not easy, it's a very difficult way. But it's on us. We should choose what kind of person we want to be. And also a lot depends on us, of course, on the society as well in which we live, because in some cases, it's really hard. Because of society, it's really hard to survive and to make your voice be heard. I understand the differences as well, of course, but we should know that in any society, it's possible if we work hard because we need to work, we need to educate and the most important, education is the way which gives us the freedom and independence. So we should fight for our right to education. So for me, it was beautiful, but it was the very hard way that I passed through. It was tiring, it was not sleeping many nights because of my work, but it's not done differently. So for success, we have to fight.