About Virago

Dear Readers,

Virago has always been a uniquely collaborative enterprise. Since the beginning, over thirty years ago, when readers sent letters and postcards about the books, the covers, the titles, and ideas for the Virago Modern Classics, our Virago readers – and indeed Virago authors – have never been backward in coming forward.

Rarely has there been such a close and intimate relationship between publisher and reader. And, like any familial relationship, it isn’t always harmonious! You tell us when you don’t think the jacket image is right, when an introducer gives away the plot, when titles are out of print, when there are too many typos – but you have also poured in your praise and pleasure and thoughts, and Virago has become a brand name.

I am convinced that one of the reasons Virago has flourished is because of our relationship with our readers. And now conducted via emails, websites, networking sites, twittering – it’s a relationship still very much alive and still very active. And still, just like family …

Welcome to the brand new Virago news and blogging site. Keep ‘em coming!

Lennie Goodings
Virago Publisher

Meet the Team

Front row (left to right): Lennie Goodings, Publisher; Ursula Doyle, Editorial Director

Back row (left to right): Victoria Pepe, Junior Editor; Donna Coonan, Commissioning Editor, Virago Modern Classics/Manager, Virago website; Elise Dillsworth, Commissioning Editor;  Rowan Cope, Commissioning Editor, Nathalie Morse, PA to Lennie Goodings

About Virago

In 1973 Carmen Callil was a young Australian woman working in London publishing. She was inspired by the explosive energy of the underground press of the time, but frustrated by its lack of engagement with women’s ideas, their work, their opinions, their history. Determined to drag women’s writing off the sidelines, she set up Virago to illustrate the variety, ambition, intelligence, passion and wit that women have always brought to the page. Carmen’s publishing venture began on a shoestring, financed by her freelance work and a tiny overdraft; now, nearly forty years later, part of the Little, Brown Book Group, Virago is flourishing as the outstanding international publisher of books by women.

Virago writers include bestselling and prizewinning authors such as Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Dunant, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood, as well as writers of some of the most provocative and original non-fiction being published today, including Lyndall Gordon’s acclaimed biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns; Kate Figes’s entertaining and perceptive book about marriage, Couples; Natasha Walter's Living Dolls, the authorative and passionate examination of hypersexual culture; and the memoirs of one of our best-loved politicians, Baroness Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves.

Virago Modern Classics, an imprint dedicated to rediscovering and republishing lost literary gems, has gone from strength to strength. A big recent success has been Mary McCarthy’s masterpiece The Group, a martini-dry novel about eight American college graduates trying to navigate 1930s Manhattan, described by Candace Bushnell as ‘a blistering satire’. From Peyton Place to The House of Mirth, from Angela Carter to Barbara Pym, the classics continue to showcase writers whose work will entertain, enthuse and inspire readers for decades to come.

Carmen Callil recently wrote, ‘I have always believed that books change lives, that writers change lives.’ This belief is at the core of what Virago stands for – a huge variety of wonderful books which tell us stories about who we are today.

This is Virago's news and blog website. Visit www.virago.co.uk for up-to-date catalogue information, author profiles and more.