Greater London Enterprise Awards 2026 – and my latest work

For reasons that the organisers know better than I do, I have been nominated for an award in the Greater London Enterprise Awards 2026. Am I an enterprise? Possibly yes, given that I have been working in the publishing industry for more decades than I care to remember, which has meant:

• appraising and editing countless pieces of work to improve them for publication, whether in books, articles, or on the web;
• teaching people editing and proofreading – I created and taught the only such course in a further education college in the UK;
• advising individuals on publishing options, the ins and outs of using mainstream publishers vs self-publishing, and the dangers of vanity publishing;
• and writing and having published my own books.

Award or not, I’m still here, doing all the above.

The latest work of my own is a book consisting of letters, mostly from my grandmother to my mother, dating from 1919 to 1947, and representing in graphic ways the stories of exiles from Austria and their experiences in the UK, Israel, the USA, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, significantly, Australia, where I was born. The letters will be accompanied by my comments and information based on research, as well as a general introduction and biographies of the main characters. I am hoping to have the book ready for submission to one of the grantmakers by the end of August. For those of you who say, ‘This sounds really interesting’, a) it is, and b) it will be in German. After it is complete, I may write a book in English, similarly based on and drawing on the letters, though not reproducing them in their huge numbers (my estimate is 600).

The photo shows my grandmother, my mother, on the left, and her sister, in the middle. Date approximately 1918.