Carmen Callil Obituary

Carmen Callil was an Australian publisher, writer, and critic who worked in the United Kingdom for the majority of her career.

Callil was born on July 15, 1938, in Melbourne, Australia, but moved to London in 1960. Lorraine Clare Allen, her widowed mother, raised four children, Callil being the third. Frederick Alfred Louis Callil, her father, was a barrister and French lecturer at the University of Melbourne.

Callil attended Star of the Sea Convent and Loreto Mandeville Hall before graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Literature.

In 1973, she founded Virago Press. Callil became the publisher of Chatto & Windus in 1982, where she worked with authors such as A S Byatt, Angela Carter, Alan Hollinghurst, David Malouf, Toni Morrison, and Marina Warner.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, received the FRSL Benson Medal in 2017, and was made a dame the same year.

Carmen Callil died of leukemia on Monday, October 17, 2022, at the age of 84 in London. She is survived by her brother Julian. Another brother and a sister predeceased her.