ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: Susie Nicklin, Literature Director of the British Council, reflects on setting up this year's Russia Market Focus at the London Book Fair

You could say that I started working on the cultural programme for the Market Focus at The London Book Fair 2011 back in 1989, on my first visit to Russia. I was in Moscow for the book fair and, having started my first meeting at 10.00 with Stalin’s favourite vodka and Stalin’s favourite cigarettes, a week unrolled unlike any other I’d experienced. The contrasting experiences of the warmth and passion of the Russians I met and the grey skies, Hotel Rossya and no food for three days remained firmly with me for the next 17 years.

My second visit was to the inaugural Moscow literature festival in 2006, set up by Sasha Gavrilov who had been one of the British Council’s Young Creative Entrepreneurs in publishing and who had won a visit to the Edinburgh International Book Festival on which he based his new endeavour. Accompanying Graham Swift and Tibor Fischer, I encountered a world of themed restaurants and white nights in St Petersburg – more confusing contrasts.

The Russian writer Dmitri Bykov said to me once ‘It only takes three months for a Brit to lose her soul to Russia’ and I suspect I may be on the verge of doing so in less than that. It’s irresistible. Nowadays Moscow boasts the most sumptuous restaurants in edgy venues, art galleries with installations that would shame New York City and prices that make your eyes water, yet that warmth and passion remain among the writers. ‘We want to meet British writers, especially your wonderful poets’ said a group of young authors to me on my most recent visit, and that is the point of the British Council’s literature work. It’s not only about bringing new work by British writers to new audiences internationally although we do masses of that – in the next six weeks alone we will broadcast radio shows all over Africa featuring British writers, take a group to Erbil in Northern Iraq, send writers to Barcelona, Dublin, Budapest, Quebec, Zagreb, Amsterdam, Tbilisi and stream live events from Hay on Wye to Colombia and Mexico.

It’s about having outstanding staff in more than 100 countries who can network, spot connections and filter that intelligence back to us in the UK; who can organise for us to meet with partners and venues in their countries so we can plot projects; and above all to touch audiences and change their lives by presenting work live, broadcast, through written text, often supported often by teaching materials. It’s about knowing the right people in every country including the UK who can ensure that when we have invested human and financial resources in our projects we achieve all we set out to do.

But seeing the faces of a group of orphans in Moscow at another event, a capacity-building project for school librarians from all over Russia, when Mal Peet did a presentation on graphic novels and the outstanding translator mimicked his tone and actions – well, mother’s milk and apple pie it may be but it makes it all worthwhile. And even getting stuck at an airport for hours has its upside. It was during one such interminable delay in Domodedovo that scout Ros Ramsay helped me to make concrete a plan to take a group of UK editors to meet counterparts in China. Readers of the ‘View From This Bridge’ blog may already know about how that went …