It feels counter-intuitive to be an editor writing a blog. We’re supposed to be the writer’s unseen help, not a writer ourselves. When I was first applying for editorial jobs, a potential employer warned me not become a publisher if I wanted to write myself. There are, of course, plenty of examples, past and present, of writers who also edit. At Random House we have the poet Robin Robertson and the historian Jenny Uglow. But nevertheless, the two activities are very different: writing entails a certain egotism, while good editing demands a suppression of the ego in order to inhabit the imaginative world of another.

This kind of altruism doesn’t necessarily come easily and must be sustained not only during the editing of a book but after publication when writers move on to the next project. Even if an author showers you with praise, they sometimes sink into silence when writing their next book, not talking to you for months, years even. In their minds you may still be with them, looking over their shoulder, a critical but hopefully supportive presence, the eager future recipient of the unborn book. But you won’t necessarily know this. Instead you miss those intense weeks when you were in constant contact, discussing character development and chapter forms. Yet it is crucial you realise the relationship is about them not you, and wait patiently for their return. Or not. Sometimes you are called upon to say a brave goodbye when they turn to other publishers, be it for the money or a fresh creative relationship. Still, you hope that there remains between you a secret understanding about what you both owe each other.

Earlier this week I caught a few minutes of a BBC documentary about the legendary editor Diana Athill – one of those rare editors who writes brilliantly about her craft. It was wonderful to get a glimpse of the exhilarating collaboration that had gone into creating Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, and to hear Sereny’s exuberance about the role Athill had played in shaping the book. It was touching, too, to see how much it mattered to Athill that she had been involved in such an important book.

But it’s not all about altruism. The strange duality of an acquiring editor’s life is that, if editing a book involves stepping out of the limelight, the acquisition of books to edit necessitates standing in its full glare. Why would any agent/author submit a book to you if they didn’t know of your existence? And, more than that, why would they do so if they weren’t convinced you had a sufficiently forceful personality to bring that book to the attention of a wide readership? To attract books as an editor you need to show off a bit. Then, when you find one you love, the process of giving yourself over to another’s imagination begins. Even before you’ve acquired the book, you have to start inhabiting its world. It happened to me this week. The Spanish agent Christian Marti Menzel sent me two novellas by Yuri Herrera, one of Mexico’s rising stars. The first about a ballad singer who becomes a performer at the ‘court’ of a drug baron (a parable of the relationship between art and power); the second a powerful combination of myth and contemporary reality in the story of a young Mexican girl seeking her brother ‘over the border’ in the shadowy community of Mexicans who have crossed the line into the USA. For a brief two days, as I made my offer, I was intoxicated by the idea of working on these remarkable books. I came down to earth with a bump when I lost them to Lee Brackstone at Faber & Faber. It’s a rollercoaster this job. You have to invest your heart and soul in books that, one way or another, you must let go of. But the important thing is that a brilliant Mexican novelist will be translated into English. As Lee said sympathetically when I asked him if I could mention him in this blog, ‘These days I try not to dwell on my loss but rather consider literature’s gain.’ Wise words.