Douglas Gibson

Last updated
Douglas Gibson
Born (1943-12-04) December 4, 1943 (age 79)
Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland
Nationality Canadian
Alma mater University of St Andrews
Yale University
Occupation(s)editor, publisher, memoirist
Known forDouglas Gibson Books, Stories About Storytellers

Douglas Maitland Gibson,C.M. (born December 4, 1943) is a Canadian editor, publisher and writer. [1] Best known as the former president and publisher of McClelland and Stewart, he was particularly noted for his professional relationships with many of Canada's most prominent and famous writers. [2]

Contents

Born in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland and raised in the nearby village of Dunlop, [1] Gibson attended the University of St. Andrews and Yale University before moving to Canada in 1967. [1] He worked briefly for McMaster University before being hired as a junior editor at Doubleday Canada, [1] where his first job was editing a biography of Stephen Leacock. [1]

In 1974 he became editorial director of Macmillan of Canada, [1] ascending to publisher of the company in 1979. [1] During his time at Macmillan, Gibson sent first-time authors an instructional guide, "What Happens After My Book Is Published?", which was published by Saturday Night in 1979 and was nominated for a National Magazine Award for humor. [1] With MacMillan, he was noted for successfully negotiating Mavis Gallant's first Canadian publishing deal; [3] Gallant, a Canadian writer who had spent much of her life and career living in Paris, France as an expatriate, was not considered to be well known in the Canadian market and did not even have a Canadian publisher at all until Gibson approached her. He also spearheaded the creation and publication of Home Truths, a compilation of Gallant's Canadian-themed stories which was her only title ever to win the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. [4] Robertson Davies, Bruce Hutchison, Jack Hodgins, Alice Munro and Morley Callaghan were also among the writers who established relationships with Gibson in this era. [5]

In the early 1980s, he also contributed film reviews to CBC Radio's Sunday Morning . [2] Throughout his career, he has also been a contributor to The Globe and Mail , the National Post , Books in Canada , Toronto Life and Maclean's . [2]

He moved to McClelland and Stewart in 1986, [6] becoming publisher of the company in 1988 [1] and president in 2000. [1] With M&S, he also managed his own imprint, Douglas Gibson Books. [2] Numerous authors, including Munro, Davies, Hodgins, Gallant, Hugh MacLennan, Donald Jack, Guy Vanderhaeghe and W.O. Mitchell, [2] followed him from Macmillan to M&S in order to continue working with him. [5] Munro returned the advance the company had already paid her for The Progress of Love , and had to enter several months of legal negotiations to get released from her contract, [2] although The Progress of Love ultimately became the first title published by Douglas Gibson Books. [2] The departures greatly damaged Macmillan, which published only a small and irregular selection of fiction titles after Gibson's departure. [2]

Gibson was awarded the Canadian Booksellers' Association President's Award in 1991. [5]

Following his retirement in 2008, Gibson published a memoir, Stories About Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Others, in 2011. [1] Munro wrote the book's introduction. In recent years, he has also been known for frequent public appearances and statements on behalf of Munro, whose declining health has prevented her from making many public engagements. [7]

Douglas Gibson Books

Gibson has retired from his primary role with M&S, but continues to hold the role of publisher emeritus with Douglas Gibson Books.

Recent works published by Douglas Gibson Books have included short story collections by Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, Terry Fallis' novels The Best Laid Plans and The High Road, Paul Wells' Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism, Yves Beauchemin's A Very Bold Leap and The Years of Fire, James Bartleman's memoir Raisin Wine: A Boyhood in a Different Muskoka, and Max Nemni and Monique Nemni's award-winning series of biographies of Pierre Trudeau.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Urquhart</span> Canadian novelist and poet

Jane Urquhart, LL.D is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool, gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canadian literature</span> Field of literature from Canada

Canadian literature is the literature of a multicultural country, written in languages including Canadian English, Canadian French, Indigenous languages, and many others such as Canadian Gaelic. Influences on Canadian writers are broad both geographically and historically, representing Canada's diversity in culture and region.

Donald Lamont Jack was an English and Canadian novelist and playwright.

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."

Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear (1976), a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McClelland & Stewart</span> Canadian publishing company

McClelland & Stewart Limited is a Canadian publishing company. It is owned by Penguin Random House of Canada, a branch of Penguin Random House, the international book publishing division of German media giant Bertelsmann.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Writers' Trust of Canada</span>

The Writers' Trust of Canada is a registered charity which provides financial support to Canadian writers.

The Journey Prize is a Canadian literary award, presented annually by McClelland and Stewart and the Writers' Trust of Canada for the best short story published by an emerging writer in a Canadian literary magazine. The award was endowed by James A. Michener, who donated the Canadian royalty earnings from his 1988 novel Journey.

Southern Ontario Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic novel genre and a feature of Canadian literature that comes from Southern Ontario. This region includes Toronto, Southern Ontario's major industrial cities, and the surrounding countryside. While the genre may also feature other areas of Ontario, Canada, and the world as narrative locales, this region provides the core settings.

<i>The Progress of Love</i>

The Progress of Love is a book of short stories by Alice Munro, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1986. It won the 1986 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, her third win of that award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Robert Colombo</span> Canadian writer, editor, and poet

John Robert Colombo, CM is a Canadian writer, editor, and poet. He has published over 200 titles, including major anthologies and reference works.

Walter Douglas Stewart was an outspoken Canadian writer, editor and journalism educator, a veteran of newspapers and magazines and author of more than twenty books, several of them bestsellers. The Globe and Mail reported news of his death with the headline: "He was Canada's conscience."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mavis Gallant</span> Canadian writer

Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant,, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.

<i>Young Trudeau</i>

Young Trudeau: 1919-1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada is the intellectual biography of the former Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau that deals with his parents, childhood, and education in the province of Quebec from his birth in 1919 until November 1944 when he left to study at Harvard University.

Macmillan of Canada was a Canadian publishing house.

<i>Too Much Happiness</i> 2009 short story collection by Alice Munro

Too Much Happiness is a short story collection by Canadian writer Alice Munro, published on August 25, 2009 by McClelland and Stewart's Douglas Gibson Books imprint. The title story is a fictional retelling of the life of the 19th century Russian mathematician and writer Sofia Kovalevskaya. The book contains ten short stories. Each story outlines the core of its protagonist by narrating selected scenes of that character's life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toronto International Festival of Authors</span>

The Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA), previously known as the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), is an annual festival presented in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Robert McGill is a Canadian writer and literary critic. He was born and raised in Wiarton, Ontario. His parents were physical education teachers. He graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1999. He attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then completed the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. After graduating with a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, Robert moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and took up a Junior Fellowship with the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He now teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

<i>Bear</i> (novel) 1976 novel by Marian Engel

Bear is a novel by Canadian author Marian Engel, published in 1976. It won the Governor General's Literary Award the same year. It is Engel's fifth novel, and her most famous. The story tells of a lonely archivist sent to work in northern Ontario, where she enters into a sexual relationship with a bear. The book has been called "the most controversial novel ever written in Canada".

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Mark Medley, "Douglas Gibson: Life among his writers" Archived February 24, 2014, at the Wayback Machine . National Post , December 23, 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Panofsky, Ruth (2012). The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN   9780802098771.
  3. ↑ "Mysterious Mavis" Archived March 24, 2016, at the Wayback Machine . CanWest News Service, April 30, 2006.
  4. ↑ "Mavis Gallant was very much Canada's". Toronto Star , February 19, 2014.
  5. 1 2 3 Justina Chong, "Douglas Gibson Books and Alice Munro, with Editorial Audio Recordings by Douglas Gibson" Archived 2014-02-24 at the Wayback Machine . Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing (McMaster University).
  6. ↑ "Munro follows publisher Gibson from Macmillan". Toronto Star , April 30, 1986.
  7. ↑ "Alice Munro unlikely to come out of retirement following Nobel win". CTV News, October 11, 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.