My friend Alastair Brotchie, who has died aged 70 from cancer, was an author, editor, book designer and scholar whose greatest career passion was publishing European avant-garde literature.
Born in Rinteln, Germany, to Donald Brotchie, an army major, and his wife, Joy (nee Sanderson), Alastair attended boarding school at Wycliffe college in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, before going to the University of Reading to study fine art. He worked as a scenic artist, painting backcloths for West End theatre productions, and became a publisher in 1983 when he and Malcolm Green, a friend from university, founded Atlas Press in order to make available in English selected work from what Alastair called the “anti-tradition” of lesser-known German, Austrian and, especially, French writers.
