As an editor, Ibrahim Ahmad brings to his work a global perspective along with a punk philosophy in the truest, most grassroots sense. He has worked in publishing for over two decades, inspired by an ethos of political activism and the strong, independent-minded underground culture of the nineties, working his way up at Akashic Books from intern to editorial director and then, in 2021, moving over to Viking, where as an executive editor he is publishing the groundbreaking and thought-provoking fiction and nonfiction he had come to be known for at the indie press.
Ibrahim Ahmad, an executive editor at Viking. (Credit: Andres Hernandez, photo assistant Kuan Hsieh)
Ahmad grew up in Washington, D.C., where as a teenager he was involved in the local music scene, volunteering at an organization called Positive Force in the 1990s, putting on shows for groups like Fugazi and Girls Against Boys, the latter of which had just signed with a corporate label, primed to be the next big thing in rock in a post-Nirvana moment. The bassist, Johnny Temple, took the money from the deal and started a record label of his own, but when it became apparent there wasn’t much need for yet another amazing indie record label, he decided to transition to publishing books. As Akashic Books ramped up, Ahmad thought the idea behind the publishing company was “intriguing and fascinating and just sounded kind of cool,” he says, and he “very naively offered to help out without fully knowing what that entailed…. I wanted to support it because I believed in the spirit behind it.”
And so in 2000, Ahmad started volunteering at Akashic, which at the time was based out of Temple’s apartment in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. (Later it would move to the Old American Can Factory, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.) Ahmad was still in school at the time, attending UWC Atlantic College, a boarding school in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales, and spending his summers in New York, all the while doing editorial work and trying to be of use. After UWC Atlantic, Ahmad attended the University of Chicago, studying Middle Eastern history—partially reflecting on his family’s background (Ahmad’s parents are from Iran and Pakistan) as well as his having lived in Saudi Arabia for a time—in addition to Arabic and Farsi while playing with a vague notion of traveling the world in the British Foreign Service (Ahmad is a British citizen). “I read too much Graham Greene,” Ahmad jokes, “and I thought that maybe someone could fashion a life of travel and have it subsidized by the Crown.”
However, in the post-9/11 world, Ahmad quickly became disillusioned with that notion. “I remain invested in the history and politics of the [U.K.], certainly, and it informs the way that I think about the world, and it’s an important part of my intellectual grounding. But I found the atmosphere to be too toxic,” he says. “I would be going to class and reading Amiri Baraka and then going back to my apartment in the evening and getting to edit Amiri Baraka as a college kid.” The world of books and New York City publishing was calling him back, so he dove in headfirst.
Over the course of an afternoon, we spoke about our mutual philosophy of book acquisitions, the importance of reading widely, his experience jumping from an indie press to one of the Big Five publishers, and why it’s important to keep pushing the envelope in one’s work.
Before we talk about your work at Viking, I’d love to hear what else made you gravitate toward Akashic and why you stayed for so long.
Especially at that time, in the early 2000s, what we were doing at Akashic—there weren’t many parallels with what was happening in corporate publishing. In fact that was part of the impetus behind Akashic in the first place: to provide a home for books that we thought perhaps wouldn’t be able to find a home elsewhere. And that really informed a lot of the early acquisitions, a lot of the areas of focus.
There has always been a strong Caribbean flavor to the Akashic list, and it’s another part of the world that I’m deeply interested in. Over the years I have spent a lot of time in the region, in Jamaica and Trinidad and on smaller islands, just getting to know writers and writing communities, ingratiating myself in those communities. And that’s always been an important part of the way I think about publishing and the way I think about the world. So I ended up finishing school and then moving back to New York—almost like an ineluctable force was pulling me to Gowanus.
I ended up back at Akashic in our offices in the Old American Can Factory, where I became the editorial director and oversaw a list of forty books a year, including some No. 1 New York Times best-sellers and some incredible authors and publications over the years—authors like Marlon James and Bernardine Evaristo and Ben Okri, Bernice L. McFadden, Elizabeth Nunez, Prodigy from [hip-hop duo] Mobb Deep, Michael Imperioli. A wild, eclectic, dynamic, interesting set of authors. Two decades went by without my even really being fully conscious of the passage of time.
Was there for you specifically a guiding light at Akashic? It was obviously founded on the ethos of We’re going to publish things that no other place will publish, but how did you take on that mantle? What did that ethos look like for you?
It was very much a DIY ethos. At the same time I like to think that the things I like and the things that collectively we liked at Akashic had outsize appeal. I remember reading, for example, Marlon James’s debut novel, John Crow’s Devil, which must’ve been in 2004 after Kaylie Jones, the writer and daughter of the great novelist James Jones, met Marlon down in Jamaica at the Calabash Literary Festival and ended up sending the manuscript to Johnny. I remember reading that book and thinking there’s no reason it should have been rejected by every agent and editor in town. Seventy-two [rejections], famously, is the story of Marlon’s path to publication, because it was clear, at least to Kaylie, to Johnny, to those of us who were reading that book at the time, that this was an exceptional, immense talent that should command a wide readership.
And I’ve always felt that way about our publications. At Akashic we punched above our weight class. I think there’s a tendency sometimes [by] some publishers to maybe…publish narrowly toward certain constituencies. And we always had outsize ambitions for our list and thought that in a just world these books should be best-sellers. It’s an interesting dynamic. Over time, certainly by 2020, it seemed like the culture had finally begun to catch up with what we had been doing all along. That was vindicating in some ways but also a little frustrating.
As you saw change happen in publishing—slowly but surely—did you then feel some siren call to move over to a bigger house?
There were aspects of that: not being able to hold on to certain authors, for example. On the one hand, I would never begrudge an author for taking a big payday, because it’s so difficult to make a living in this business. And in fact I would highly encourage authors when they’re being offered a lot of money to do their due diligence, of course. But if you’re in a position where you can’t pay your rent and feed your kids and put food on the table, you’ve got to make it work somehow. And to be able to do that through your craft, it’s a gift. But it was also Akashic being treated as a kind of farm team for the big houses; there was just something a little off-putting about that dynamic. A confluence of reasons ended up compelling me to make the move. Twenty years is a long time to do anything.
In one place.
In one place. And I also realized that while I knew our business inside out, there was so much about book publishing that I didn’t know. I was ready for a new type of challenge. Especially in the context of what I perceived as a new kind of dynamic taking hold, at the same time that people like you and Jamia Wilson and Lisa Lucas and others also made the move from various places in the literary ecosystem into the world of corporate publishing.
Like everything else in my life, I think it was somewhat of a combination of fortuitousness and almost a happy accident. I wasn’t actively looking to make a move. But I had had a casual conversation with the publisher [at Viking] Brian Tart, and I was curious. I realized then that something was afoot. I also admittedly had some insight into the composition of the list and into the work environment through my next-door neighbor in the lower Hudson Valley Wendy Wolf, who retired from Viking [as vice president and associate publisher] at the end of December 2023 after multiple decades of great service. She’s the embodiment of a living legend who had an incredible publishing career and whose fingerprints are all over the Viking list. And it just so happens that we share a fence line. So casually and through our deep friendship, I had a little bit of insight into the inner workings of Viking, but not all that much.
In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen Wendy at a loss for words is when I told her that I was contemplating taking a job at Viking. And so this happened independent of Wendy, but it also seemed like such a great fit intellectually. My interests are broad and eclectic, and Viking has a big enough mandate that I felt like I would be able to explore all my idiosyncratic interests with a list and with this incredible machinery that Viking Penguin and PRH brings to the table. That was exciting to me and remains really exciting to me.
