Carmen Callil (1938–2022)

Australia has produced (or welcomed) some fine publishers, but none was more influential on the world stage than Carmen Callil, who has died in London at the age of eighty-four.

Callil, like so many before her, sailed to London as soon as she could escape Melbourne. She was twenty-one – ‘a dumpy little thing with a colonial accent and an inferiority complex … convinced I could do anything’.  And anything she emphatically did. When she was our Open Page subject in August 2018, Advances liked the story about Callil’s advertising in the London Times: ‘Australian BA, typing: wants job in publishing.’ Three offers came her way; she accepted the one at Hutchinson’s. (Those were the days.) Callil worked first as a publicist (a book called A Female Eunuch was one of her early campaigns), then as an editor. She founded Virago Press in 1972 and was managing editor of Chatto & Windus from 1982 to 1994.

She published everyone – Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Iris Murdoch, David Malouf among them – and helped to revive interest in the likes of Rebecca West and Christina Stead. In later years she wrote journalism and judged prizes, not always peaceably (she spat the dummy when the Man Booker International Prize went to Philip Roth). Her own books included Bad Faith: A forgotten history of family and fatherland (2006) and Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times which Brenda Niall reviewed in our November 2020 issue.

In the many fond tributes, Callil has been described as ‘one of the world’s quarrellers’. Her temper was legendary, though some of the anecdotes have an apocryphal, even self-mythological overtone, like the one about the time she sacked a secretary and called the police to have her removed from the building tout de suite.

Interestingly, Carmen Callil accepted a damehood in 2017. Few knock them back in Britain: not even rock stars or feminist publishers with an Australian BA.