Penguin
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In the early 1930's, most publishers thought the market for quality books was limited to a handful of elite readers. Allen Lane, then managing director of the Bodley Head, a British publishing company, had other ideas. While searching for something to read on his trip back to London after visiting Agatha Christie—and only finding popular magazines and reprints of Victorian novels in the railway station kiosk—he was convinced that there was a need for moderately priced editions of good-quality contemporary writing.
Setting up his business in the crypt of London's Trinity Church, he began to reprint quality fiction and nonfiction in low-cost paperback editions. In July 1935, he revolutionized publishing with the introduction of the first ten Penguin paperbacks. Within a year, more than one hundred titles were in print and one million Penguin books had been sold. In 1946, Allen Lane published classical scholar E.V.Rieu's translation of The Odyssey which went on to sell three million copies worldwide. That was the beginning of the Penguin Classics, Lane then asked Rieu to commission translations of other works for the new series. Little did Lane realize the impact his "paperback revolution" had on reading—today, 75 years later, more than 600 million paperbacks are sold annually worldwide. Now Penguin and Penguin Classics trade paperbacks and eBooks carry the most recognized logo of any book publisher in the world, with a list as stimulating and diverse as readers themselves.
Covering such subjects as literature, biography, memoir, history, science, business, psychology, popular reference, poetry and self-help, the Penguin list now has more than 3,000 books in print in the United States.
Penguin has long been committed to publishing great fiction and poetry, including the work of Nobel laureates, National Book Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Man Booker winners, and bestselling authors. Sebastian Barry, T. C. Boyle, Geraldine Brooks, J. M. Coetzee, Carl Dennis, Rita Dove, Stella Duffy, Kim Edwards, Juliette Fay, Jasper Fforde, Adam Foulds, Tana French, Margaret George, Paolo Giordano, Nadine Gordimer, Sophie Hannah, Deborah Harkness, Terrence Hayes, Beth Hoffman, Ryan David Jahn, Jan Karon, Garrison Keillor, William Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Philip Kerr, Ken Kesey, Sheila Kohler, Sue Monk Kidd, John le Carré, Janice Y.K. Lee, Francois Lelord, Drew Magary, Arthur Miller, Robin Oliveira, Stewart O’Nan, Ann Ross, Zadie Smith, Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, William Trevor, Danielle Trussoni, Christos Tsiolkas, William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Jacqueline Yallop and Carlos Ruiz Zafón are only a few of the writers whose work is published by Penguin
On the nonfiction side, Penguin publishes many such knowledgeable and wonderful writers as Liaquat Ahamed, David Allen, John M. Barry, Antony Beevor, John Berendt, Ingrid Betancourt, David Byrne, Novella Carpenter, Rosanne Cash, Ron Chernow, Amy Chua, Steve Coll, Matthew Crawford, George Dawson, Jared Diamond, Norman Doidge, Niall Ferguson, Zlata Filipovic, Roger Fisher, Joshua Foer, Paul French, Elizabeth Gilbert, Paul Greenberg, Robert Greene, Linda Greenlaw, Ted Gup, Paul Johnson, Rula Jebreal, Tony Judt, Mary Karr, John Keegan, Mark Kurlansky, Ray Kurzweil, Aung San Suu Kyi ,Michael Lewis, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Dan Morrison, Nathaniel Philbrick, Steven Pinker, Michael Pollan, Sir Ken Robinson, Nouriel Roubini, Arundhati Roy, Jeffrey Sachs, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rebecca Solnit, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jonathan Spence, Amy Tan, Lewis Thomas, Krista Tippett, Jim Trelease, Scott Turow, Garry Wills, and many other great writers.
Penguin Mysteries are a select and diverse group of titles that round out the Penguin list with stellar domestic and international bestsellers including works by Nancy Atherton, Andrea Camilleri, Craig Johnson, Donna Leon, M.L. Longworth, C.J. Sansom and Fred Vargas.
Because What You Read Matters: Penguin Classics
For 65 years, Penguin has been the leading Classics publisher in the English-speaking world, providing readers with a global bookshelf of the best works from around the world and across history, genres, and disciplines. We focus on bringing together the best of the past and the future, using cutting edge design and production as well as embracing the digital age to create unforgettable editions of treasured literature. Penguin Classics is timeless and trend-setting. Whether you love our familiar black spine series, our Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, or our Penguin Amplified eBook Classics, we bring the writer to the reader in every format available.
The Penguin Classics series comprises more than 1500 titles, making it the largest publisher of ancient and modern classic literature in the English-speaking world. The Classics list includes a vast array of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry based on definitive texts and introduced by experts, and many magnificent translations including Robert Fagles' translations of Homer and Virgil, Pevear and Volokhonsky's award-winning translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Lydia Davis's monumental translations of Proust's Swann's Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tiina Nunnally's translation of Undset's 3 volume epic Kristin Lavransdatter and Edith Grossman’s acclaimed translation of Gongora’s The Solitudes.
Penguin Classics is also the exclusive publisher of modern authors such as John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, Leslie Marmon Silko and Iris Murdoch. Included in the series are Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, the Penguin Classics Portables and the Penguin Classics Deluxe editions featuring covers illustrated by such renowned graphic artists as Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Roz Chast, Frank Miller and Audrey Niffenegger, as well as covers by fashion illustrators Ruben Toledo and Richard Gray, and Penguin Threads, art directed by Paul Buckley with cover art by Jillian Tamaki.
Penguin Classics began a complete repackaging program for the entire list in 2003, updating notes and introductions, improving paper quality, and adding a broad range of new titles, all on the cutting edge of scholarship, and of interest both to the trade and academia.
The Penguin list continues to grow, to embrace new writers, and to keep in print the works of some of the world's most important authors. Readers' needs and tastes change, and the Penguin list has evolved over more than 65 years. With its familiar logo that stands for quality and distinction, the Penguin also represents what is fresh, contemporary and bestselling in paperbacks and eBooks.
Kathryn Court
President and Publisher
Kathryn Court joined Penguin Books in 1977 and became Editorial Director two years later. In 1984 she was named Editor in Chief of Viking Penguin and in 1992 Senior Vice-President, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Penguin Books. She was named President of Penguin Books in August 2000. Among the authors she has worked with are Reinaldo Arenas, Antony Beevor, Andrea Camilleri, J.M. Coetzee, Slavenka Drakulic, Mary Relindes Ellis, Robert Fagles, Josephine Humphreys, Craig Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Nora Okja Keller, John le Carré, Janice Y.K. Lee, Simon Lelic, Donna Leon, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Mary McGarry Morris, John Mortimer, Robin Oliveira, Linda Olsson, Vicki Robin, Richard Rodriguez, C.J. Samsom, Amy Tan, Jim Trelease, William Trevor, Scott Turow, and Jacqueline Yallop.
Stephen Morrison
VP, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher
Stephen Morrison was named Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher of Penguin Books in 2005 and a VP in 2008. Before this appointment, he was the Director of Rights and Executive Editor for Bloomsbury USA. He was a Senior Editor at Penguin from 2000 to 2003, when he acquired reprint rights for such titles as Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, Anthony Doerr's award-winning The Shell Collector, Rosamund Stone Zander and Ben Zander's The Art of Possibility and the French bestseller How I Became Stupid by Martin Page. Current authors he works with include Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart (Plato & A Platypus Walk in to A Bar), Kathleen Flinn (The Sharper The Knife, The Less You Cry), Sophie Hannah (The Wrong Mother), Judith Schalansky (The Atlas of Remote Islands), Paul French (Midnight in Peking, 2012) and Jan Wallentin (Strindberg's Star, 2012).
Elda Rotor
Editorial Director, Penguin Classics
Elda Rotor joined Penguin Classics as Executive Editor in 2006 and became Editorial Director in 2008. Before Penguin, she was Senior Editor at Oxford University Press. Titles include the Couture Classics with cover art by fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo, deluxe editions with graphic cover art for The Communist Manifesto, Great Expectations, and Persuasion, the Penguin Threads series, American Scriptures edited by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, In Corner B by Es’kia Mphahlele, The Martyred by Richard Kim, and Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal. She is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (November 2011), edited by Rita Dove, Lincoln on the Civil War, The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution edited by Richard Beeman, and The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama.
Awards
The Nobel Prize for Literature
2003: J.M. Coetzee, South Africa
1991: Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
1990: Octavio Paz, Mexico
1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Columbia
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer, U.S.
1976: Saul Bellow, U.S.
1972: Heinrich Boll, Germany
1971: Pablo Neruda, Chile
1962: John Steinbeck, U.S.
1949: William Faulkner, U.S.
1948: T.S. Eliot, England
1947: Andre Gide, France
1946: Herman Hesse, Switzerland
1936: Eugene O'Neill, U.S.
1934: Luigi Pirandello, Italy
1933: Ivan G. Bunin, U.S.S.R.
1930: Sinclair Lewis, U.S.
1929: Thomas Mann, Germany
1928: Sigrid Undset, Norway
1925: George Bernard Shaw, Ireland
1923: William Butler Yeats, Ireland
1921: Anatole France, France
1920: Knut Hamson, Norway
1913: Rabindranath Tagore, India
1907: Rudyard Kipling, England
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shield
1976: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1940: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
2011: Washington by Ron Chernow
2010: The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
2005: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll
1987: Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler
1952: Collected Poems by Marianne Moore
The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
2002: Practical Gods by Carl Dennis
The National Book Award
2010: Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
2001: Arthur Miller, 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters
2000: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
1988: Paris Trout by Pete Dexter
1985: White Noise by Don DeLillo
1977: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner
1976: J.R. by William Gaddis
1974: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
1971: Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow
1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1965: Herzog by Saul Bellow
1954: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The National Book Critics Circle Award
2006: Them by Francine du Plessix Gray
2004: River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
1999: Selected Non-Fictions by Jorges Luis Borges
1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Booker Prize
1999: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
1993: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
1985: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1983: Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee
1978: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
1974: The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
Agatha Award for Best Novel
2005: Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear
Alex Award for Adult Boooks for Young Adults
2003: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
ALA Notable Book of the Year
2005: Collapse by Jared Diamond
American Academy of Arts and Letters:
2001: Garrison Keillor (for body of work)
2001: Alice Notley: Literature
2001: Rachel Wetzsteon: Poetry
American Society of Journalists and Authors' Nonfiction Award
2003: Dojo Wisdom by Jennifer Lawler
Asian American Literature Award
2001: Drivers at the Short-time Motel by Eugene Gloria
Biennial Valiente Award
2006: Against Gravity by Farnoosh Moshiri
Book Sense Book of the Year for Nonfiction
2001: Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King
Borders Original Voices Award for Fiction
2005: Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
2003: Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Borders Original Voices Award for Non-Fiction
2006: Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award
2000: Jane Langton
California Book Awards: Nonfiction
2003: Brown: The Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez
California Book Award Gold Medal
2006: Europe Central by William Vollman
California Book Award Silver Medal
2006: Collapse by Jared Diamond
Christopher Award for Nonfiction
2000: Life is So Good by George Dawson
Christy Award for Contemporary/General Fiction given by The Christian Booksellers Association
2000: A New Song by Jan Karon
Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Award
2006: Postwar by Tony Judt
Irish Times Literary Prize for Fiction
2001: The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor
Irish Times Literary Prize for Nonfiction
2001: The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke
The James Beard Foundation Award for Writing on Food
2002: The Last Days of Haute Cuisine by Patric Kuh
Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for Translation of Japanese Literature
2002-2003: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler
Jerusalem Prize for Freedom of the Individual in Society
2003: Arthur Miller
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
2000: Reign of Snakes by Robert Wrigley
Koret Jewish Book Award: Fiction
2003: Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After by Henryk Grynberg
Lannon Literary Award in Poetry
2005: Generations by Pattiann Rogers
Lettre Ulysses Award for Literary Reportage
2005: Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller
Lionel Gelber Prize
2004: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll
The Los Angeles Times Book Prize
1999: Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel
1998: Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley
1998: A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes
The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery
2006: Legends by Robert Littell
MacArthur Foundation Fellows
2003: Lydia Davis, translator of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way
McCavity Award for Fiction
2000: River of Darkness by Rennie Airth
Mark Lynton History Prize
2004: River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
National Parenting Publication Award
2006: Raising a Sensory Smart Child by Lindsey Biel and Nancy Peske
New York City Book Award for Historical Fiction
2004: The Newsboy's Lodging House by Jon Boorstin
New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
2005: American Dream by Jason De Parle
The Orange Prize for Fiction
2006: On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for Best First Book of Nonfiction
2002: Zero by Charles Seife
1983: Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
The PEN BOMC Translation Prize
2002: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
2001: Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross by Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina Nunnally
2000: Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writings by Gerard de Nerval, translated by Richard Sieburth
The PEN Center USA Literary Awards
2003: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg
Public Service Award given by The National Science Board
2000: Dava Sobel
San Diego Book Prize for Best Mainstream Novel
2000: Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Best Work of Nonfiction
2003: River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
Sidney Hillman Journalism Award in the Book Category
2005: American Dream by Jason De Parle
Southern Book Award for Fiction
2003: Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
2001: Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys
Spain's Prince Asturis Award of Letters
2005: Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and The Invention of Solitude
Storyteller of the Year Award
2000: Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Theodore Geisl Best Book of the Year Award
2000: Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Theoligos Award for Best Academic Book
2005: Whose Bible Is It? by Jaroslav Pelikan
Wisconsin Literary Award
2005: The Turtle Warrior by Mary Relindes Ellis
