Books, money and milk cartons (original) (raw)

If you didn't know that Sigrid Rausing came from one of the richest families in Britain, worth billions, you wouldn't immediately guess. And there is no reason, of course, why you should guess, or care - except that the uses to which she has put those riches have given her an unusual kind of power.

For about 20 years, she has been a quietly formidable philanthropist. Her gifts - nearly £70m so far - have often gone towards human rights projects in the third world, where a small amount can be a significant windfall. But recently she has been branching out. Last spring, she launched Portobello Books, which aims to publish "activist non-fiction" as well as some fiction. Then, in the autumn, she bought Granta - both the magazine and publishing house. While Granta's significance may have waned in recent years it remains a literary kingmaker. This makes Rausing, its new owner, a major player in British cultural life.

So who is she? And how will she exercise this power? Rausing arrives at her trust's Notting Hill offices in a late, wet-haired fluster. She took hayfever pills that were unexpectedly powerful and is still feeling the effects. Her face is strong, but delicately mobile; her voice warm and impassioned, but also so quiet it is hard to hear. And it still has a lilting Swedish lilt to it.

She grew up in Sweden, the granddaughter of Ruben Rausing, who developed the Tetra Pak, the laminated cardboard container that everything from orange juice to cream now comes in. Ruben's sons Hans (Sigrid's father) and Gad built Tetra Pak into one of the world's most successful companies. Moving to Britain in 1982 to get away from Swedish inheritance taxes, they became this country's richest residents. Today the family fortune is estimated to be £4.95bn.

Inheriting is a funny thing. It confers immense privilege, but also delegitimises: Rausing apparently finds being referred to as the "Tetra Pak heiress", with its implication that any intellectual interest is dilettantism, infuriating. She has said that when she was younger, an aspiring academic living in a dingy London flat, she hid the fact of her wealth. Eventually, she sought therapy because: "I wanted to be who I was and didn't want to hide anything any more. I know people who are emotionally crippled by money they inherited."

Her solution has been to help others. One day, in her mid-20s, she found herself sitting on her bedroom floor surrounded by bits of paper, deciding on her first big grant - £50,000 to Oxfam: "I was very nervous about it, because I much preferred people not to know," she says. But it was a kind of coming-out. Since then, the trust has grown rapidly. There is now a Rausing director of the centre for the study of human rights at the London School of Economics, and this year she is opening regional funds in Turkey, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania. She doesn't think small: her abiding concern is with promoting social justice, and "democracy, with all its freedoms". The interesting thing is that she has huge resources, but none of the political hobbling - or accountability - a government might be subject to. I find it encouraging that she acknowledges the potential pitfalls. "Cultural sensitivity - the very term is somewhat patronising - is essential," she says, "and so is a strong position on human rights. So much of 'culture', after all, is a constant process of the invention of tradition, so one must always look critically at any discourse that proposes a coherent and essentialist cultural system when that system may be used as an apology for oppression." It's a typically serious and nuanced answer - typically wonkish, too.

Four years ago, a Guardian investigation revealed that her father was in receipt, in one year at least, of more from the UK Treasury in grants and rebates than he paid in taxes. She has said elsewhere that when the investigation was published, "I cried and cried." Isn't avoiding tax, I ask, a kind of hypocrisy? Her response is fierce. "I do not 'avoid' paying tax," she says. "The tax laws and levels of taxation in this country are determined by the government, and it is pointless to complain that people don't pay more than they are legally obliged to do."

She describes herself as an old-fashioned liberal, a believer in safety nets. "You may argue that that money would have been better spent by the government. My belief is that supporting an infrastructure, or a civil society, outside governmental control is of equal benefit to society."

So where did the charitable impulse begin? "When I was about 13, I became passionately interested in human rights, and I joined Amnesty. And I was always interested in the Holocaust." Her great-uncle met the Red Cross trucks arriving in Sweden from the camps; her grandfather was subjected to anti-Semitism - "Rausing" meant he came from an area called Raus, but to the pro-Nazi movement in Sweden the name sounded Jewish. (Both Sigrid's husbands have been Jewish; when she married the first, South African art dealer Dennis Hotz, the father of her eight-year-old son, she converted to Judaism.)

Sigrid came to England at 17, to boarding school in Oxford. She says she loved it, the academic side especially - books have always been part of her life. "I seduced Sigrid by giving her a copy of [Dai Sijie's] Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," her second husband, Eric Abraham, told a paper last year. Abraham, who in 1976 fled house arrest in South Africa, and in Britain became a producer for Panorama and of an Oscar-winning film, Kolya, met Sigrid in the Caribbean. They married in 2003. Portobello Books is twinned with his film company, Portobello Pictures.

Rausing may want to change the world, but she is not self-denying. She and Abraham live in a £20m house near Holland Park and she spent a rumoured £10m doing it up. It has the second-largest garden in London after Buckingham Palace; she also owns 40,000 acres in the Scottish highlands, where, in her quest to make a wildlife haven for golden eagles, hill hares and capercaillie, she has joined epic battles with her neighbours about wind farms.

According to the journalist Cristina Odone, who attended the same school, Rausing and Abraham tend to socialise with old money or with intellectuals and occasional government figures, who at some gatherings are invited to air their views, protected by Chatham house rules. Because Abraham is also a theatre producer, there are stage people as well - Tom Stoppard, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Christopher Hampton.

Rausing says she has read Granta since the 80s - "under Bill Buford, when every issue was shockingly masculine" - and under Ian Jack, whose tone of "serious restraint" she appreciates. When owner Rea Hederman made it known that he wanted to sell, Granta approached her.

If they expected her to be a hands-off, silent partner, however, they were mistaken. When she began with a controversial review of operations that resulted in the departure of the publishers of the magazine and book imprint respectively, the smiles of welcome, on some faces, froze a little. But for all those who were upset, there were also those who appreciated that a business that had grown organically now needed streamlining. Rausing attends book acquisition meetings, and reads all the manuscripts. Does she have final approval over every book published? "Yes. Yes." A pause. "Collaborative approval." At Portobello, she's so involved she is currently line-editing a novel translated from Swedish. She intends, eventually, to step back from Granta, but only after changes have been made: there is to be fiction acquisition again, closer relations with the magazine, more attention to the Granta brand. And everything - Granta, Portobello Films and Books, the trust - is to move to a new building in Notting Hill.

Is she worried that the imprints might be perceived as "soft" - charitable causes, vanity presses? She bridles at this. "It's certainly not going to be the case that I'm going to be pushing through books that the editors don't like." Nor, she insists, will money be thrown at pet projects: "I think one has to beware of paying advances that are too big, just for the sake of it." They have imposed strict budgets - "I think we have to, in order to get a sense of internal discipline." But not being part of a corporation or beholden to shareholders also means Granta can take risks. At the Hay festival last year, Jeremy Leggett was bemoaning big-publisher nervousness about his polemic on the energy crisis, Half Gone. It has been Portobello's bestseller so far - and an indication of what Rausing might mean by "activist non-fiction".

As for Granta, and its place in the culture, can she feel the prickle of interested bystanders waiting and watching - for her success, or failure? "Yeah," she says, feelingly. But then, "I quite like it, actually. I find it incredibly stimulating."

And through her soft voice there flashes a glint of steel.