Carmen Callil

Carmen Thérèse Callil (15 July 1938) is a publisher, writer and critic. She founded Virago Press in 1973.

Life

Callil was born in Melbourne Australia, but has lived in London since 1960. Her mother Lorraine Clare Allen, widowed in her early forties, raised four children of whom Carmen was the third. Her father, Frederick Alfred Louis Callil was a barrister and bibliophile, and a Lecturer in French at Melbourne University.

Education

Callil was educated at Star of the Sea Convent, and at Loreto Mandeville Hall. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA Arts degree in History and Literature in 1960.

Career

In the same year she left for Europe, and, after a period in Italy, settled in London in 1964. She worked for Marks & Spencer as a buying assistant, then, after placing an advertisement in the Times Newspaper: "Australian, B.A. wants job in book publishing", began work at Hutchinson Publishing company in 1965. From 1967-1970 she was Publicity Manager of the paperback imprint Panther Books, and later all imprints of Granada Publishing, and then at Anthony Blond and André Deutsch. She left to work for Ink, a countercultural Newspaper founded by Richard Neville, Andrew Fisher, Felix Dennis and Ed Victor in 1971. Ink was an offshoot of Oz and was intended to be a bridge between the underground press of the 1960s and the national newspapers of that time. Launched in April 1971, it collapsed with the Oz trial for obscenity of Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson.

At Ink, Callil met Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, who went on to found the feminist magazine Spare Rib in June 1972. At the same time Carmen Callil founded Virago, to "publish books which celebrated women and women's lives, and which would, by so doing, spread the message of women's liberation to the whole population". Rowe and Boycott became Directors of Virago in its first years.

Also in 1972 Callil launched a Book Publicity Company, Carmen Callil Limited. Harriet Spicer became Callil's assistant. This publicity company, run by Spicer and Callil, helped to finance Virago in its early years, together with Callil's inheritance from her grandfather. Further assistance came from Quartet Books, with whom the first nine Virago titles were published. Ursula Owen became a part time editor in 1974. She was to become a full time director, with considerable responsibility for the content of the Virago publishing list.

In 1976 Virago became an independent company, with Callil, Owen and Spicer as Directors, shortly to be joined by Lennie Goodings and Alexandra Pringle.

In 1982 Callil was appointed Managing Director of Chatto & Windus and The Hogarth Press where she remained until 1994, continuing also as Chairman of Virago Press until 1995. In 1994 she was Editor-At-Large for the worldwide group of Random House publishing companies. At Virago, among other business and editorial aspects of the company, she was responsible for the creation and development of the Virago Modern Classics list, which brought back into print many hundreds of the best women writers of the past. At Chatto & Windus, among the writers she published were Iris Murdoch, V. S. Pritchett, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, David Malouf, Amos Oz, Edward Said, Alice Munro, Marina Warner, Alan Hollinghurst, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, Francis Wheen and Michael Holroyd.

Callil left book publishing in 1994, and for some years divided her time between London and Caunes-Minervois in France. As a writer and critic, she has written reviews and features for many newspapers and journals, in addition to occasional radio and television work.

From 1985-1991 she was a member of the Board of Channel 4 Television. She was a Member of the Committee for The Booker Prize, 1979–1984; a founder Director of The Groucho Club, London, 1984–1994 and in 1989 received the Distinguished Service Award from the International Women's Writing Guild. She is a Doctor of Letters from Sheffield University, the University of York, Oxford Brookes University and the Open University. She has also been a judge of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and The Orwell Prize. She was Chairman of Judges, Booker Prize for Fiction, in 1996.

In May 2011, when Philip Roth was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize, Callil, who was one of the judges, withdrew in protest, calling Roth's work the 'Emperor's clothes.' She said "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe... I don’t rate him as a writer at all, I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire -– all the others were fine."

Bibliography

• Lebanese Washing Stories, New Writing 5, The British Council/Vintage 1996
• With Craig Raine (editors) New Writing 7, The British Council/Vintage 1998. ISBN 0-09-954561-6
• With Colm Tóibín: The Modern Library: The Best 200 Novels in English since 1950, Picador 1999. ISBN 0-330-34182-0
• Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland, Jonathan Cape & Alfred A. Knopf 2006; Buchet Chastel 2007 ISBN 9780099498285

External links

• Oxford Brookes Carmen Callil Profile
• New Statesman articles by Carmen Callil
• Random House Carmen Callil page
• My Home: Carmen Callil