Carmen Callil in 1996, when she was one of the judges of the Booker Prize
(Picture: PA)Dame Carmen Callil has died following a battle with leukaemia.
The beloved public figure and inspirational founder of Virago Press passed away at her London home at the age of 84.
Tributes from across the literary world have poured in for Dame Carmen, with many celebrating her life and work.
Find out about who Dame Carmen was and why she was so influential below.
Who was Carmen Callil?
Dame Carmen Therese Callil was an Australian publisher, author and critic who spent most of her life in the UK.
The Melbourne native studied history and literature at the University of Melbourne, before moving to London in 1964.
At the start of her career, she worked as a Marks & Spencer’s buying assistant. Wanting to take her life in a different direction, she placed an advertisement in The Times that said: “Australian B.A. wants job in book publishing”. That’s how she joined the British publishing firm Hutchinsons in 1965.
She worked for numerous publishers and wrote for magazines, including the feminist title Spare Rib, before founding Virago Press in 1973. Her publishing firm’s aim was clear; she wanted to publish books that celebrated women and their lives and prioritise female writers in the male-dominated publishing industry.
In the firm’s first years, Callil used the money she earned from her book publicity company Carmen Callil Limited and her grandfather’s inheritance to keep the business going. But, in time, Virago was able to become an independent and self-sufficient company.
Even when Callil took on senior positions at Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press and Random House, she remained as Virago’s chairman. During that time, she sat on the board of Channel 4 Television.
However, after a downturn in the market, Callil ended her work as the chairman of Virago and the board sold the company to the American publishing house Little, Brown and Company in 1996.
Other notable moments of Callil’s career included chairing the Booker Prize for fiction in 1996, judging the 2011 Man Booker International Prize and publishing her well-reviewed 2006 book Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland.
In 2017, she was awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).
