J.F.: I think your main concern is to make me seem like an articulate and scary person. Good luck.

When I had completed The Woman Who Always Loved Picasso (Carcanet, 2019) I showed the poems to my friend and almost neighbour Liz Calder. Liz said they would work well with drawings and why not ask Jeff Fisher who had recently come to live close by. She has known Jeff for ages: he did a lot of the covers for her when she was running Bloomsbury, starting with the anthology Soho Square One, which appeared annually, always with a complex new image and Jeff’s variation on Bloomsbury’s logo of a female goddess with bow and arrow. Explaining the nature of their working relationship, he says ‘she let me be completely in charge of how a cover could be and maintained religiously that everything I produced was the best cover in the history of all covers. For the Bloomsbury Classic series which eventually ran to one hundred titles, Liz would simply send him the book and he’d reply with an abstracted and beautiful design, I have a fascination for pattern and would happily keep inventing them until time stood still.

Jeff has also been responsible for all the posters during the seventeen years of the Flip Literary Festival, which is held in the town of Paraty on the coast of Brazil, as well as for the four years of its English version, Flipside. This is not to mention his work for a number of other publishers, including the European ones who often send him ...