Frances Coady

Last updated

Frances Coady
Frances Coady Publisher by Peter Carey at home 2022 08 20.jpg
Born
London, England
Education University of Sussex; University of Essex
Occupations
  • Publisher
  • literary agent
Website https://aragi.net/agents/frances-coady/

Frances Coady is a veteran British publisher. [1] [2] who started Vintage paperbacks [3] [4] [5] in the UK before moving to New York as the publisher of Picador, [6] where she is now a literary agent at the Aragi agency. [7]

Contents

Early life

Born in London, Frances Coady has degrees from the University of Sussex and the University of Essex. [8]

Career

Coady began her publishing career in 1982 in London at Faber & Faber, [9] [10] where she published Self-Help by Lorrie Moore, [11] The Final Passage and The European Tribe by Caryl Phillips, [12] and Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic and After the Last Sky. [9] In 1987, she became editorial director of Jonathan Cape [13] and was featured in "The Powers That Will Be – We Choose the People Who Will Run Britain In the Nineties" [14] in The Sunday Times Magazine . In 1989, she became the founding publisher of Vintage paperbacks [15] [3] [16] "whose stunning success launched a thousand embarrassing moments in editorial conferences throughout Britain", according to The Independent . [17] She continued to edit and publish authors including Edward Said ( Culture and Imperialism ); [18] Salman Rushdie ( The Moor's Last Sigh ) [19] [20] [21] and John Pilger [22] (A Secret Country).

In 1993, Coady became the publisher [23] of the newly created literary division of Random House UK, and "one of the most powerful women in British publishing". [17] She left Random House to relaunch Granta Books [24] as a fully independent publishing house publishing in 1997. [2] [25]

In 2000, Coady moved to New York to become the publisher of Picador USA, [26] an imprint of the Macmillan Group, which she turned into a paperback house with bestsellers and award-winning authors including Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ; [27] Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses , [28] Edmund De Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes [29] and Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose Novels. [30]

She also published Frances Coady Books within Henry Holt and Farrar Straus & Giroux, [31] including Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine ; [32] [33] Richard Powers' Generosity [34] and; Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli. [35] Vintage originals included The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg [36] and Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues . [37] In September 2012, Coady joined Scott Rudin and Barry Diller of IAC to found a new publishing house, Brightline, [38] which became Atavist Books. [39] Atavist Books launched in 2014 with Karen Russell's Sleep Donation [40]

As a literary agent at Aragi, Coady's authors include: Sharon Olds; Claudia Rankine; Ocean Vuong; Michael Cunningham, and Rebecca Solnit. [41]

Awards and distinctions

Coady is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Personal life

Coady is married to the novelist Peter Carey. [42]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Naomi Klein</span> Canadian author and activist (born 1970)

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labour, criticism of corporate globalization, fascism and capitalism. In 2021, Klein took up the UBC Professorship in Climate Justice, joining the University of British Columbia's Department of Geography. She has been the co-director of the newly launched Centre for Climate Justice since 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salman Rushdie</span> Indian-born British-American novelist (born 1947)

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kazuo Ishiguro</span> British writer and Nobel Laureate (b. 1954)

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

<i>The Remains of the Day</i> Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day is a 1989 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The protagonist, Stevens, is a butler with a long record of service at Darlington Hall, a fictitious stately home near Oxford, England. In 1956, he takes a road trip to visit a former colleague, and reminisces about events at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 1930s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hari Kunzru</span> British novelist and journalist

Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is a British novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Cape</span> English publishing firm (founded 1921)

Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape (1879–1960), who was head of the firm until his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kamila Shamsie</span> Pakistani and British writer and novelist (born 1973)

Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.

Desmond Hogan is an Irish writer. Awarded the 1977 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and 1980 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, his oeuvre comprises novels, plays, short stories and travel writing.

Puffin Books is a longstanding children's imprint of the British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s, it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. The imprint now belongs to Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bantam Books</span> Publisher from the USA

Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by parent company Random House, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine, with funding from Grosset & Dunlap and Curtis Publishing Company. It has since been purchased several times by companies including National General, Carl Lindner's American Financial and, most recently, Bertelsmann, which in 1986 purchased what had grown to become the Bantam Doubleday Dell publishing group. Bertelsmann purchased Random House in 1998, and in 1999 merged the Bantam and Dell imprints to become the Bantam Dell publishing imprint. In 2010, the Bantam Dell division was consolidated with Ballantine Books to form the Ballantine Bantam Dell group within Random House. By no later than February 2015, Bantam Books had re-emerged as a stand-alone imprint within Random House; as of 2023, it continues to publish as the Bantam imprint, again grouped in a renamed Ballantine division within Random House.

Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta was a British and American editor. Mehta was the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.

Dell Publishing Company, Inc. is an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, that was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte Jr. with $10,000, two employees and one magazine title, I Confess, and soon began turning out dozens of pulp magazines, which included penny-a-word detective stories, articles about films, and romance books.

Marianne Wiggins is an American author. According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, Wiggins writes with "a bold intelligence and an ear for hidden comedy." She has won a Whiting Award, an National Endowment for the Arts award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2004 for her novel Evidence of Things Unseen.

<i>Satanic Verses</i> controversy Reaction to Salman Rushdies 1988 novel

The Satanic Verses controversy, also known as the Rushdie Affair, was a controversy sparked by the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. It centered on the novel's references to the Satanic Verses, and came to include a larger debate about censorship and religious violence. It included numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings by perpetrators who supported Islam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Freeman (author)</span> American writer and a literary critic

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 2009 until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently an executive editor at the publishing house Knopf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atavist</span> Multimedia publishing platform

AtavistInc. was originally founded in 2011, by Jefferson Rabb, Evan Ratliff, and Nicholas Thompson in Brooklyn, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liz Calder</span> British publisher (born 1938)

Elisabeth Nicole Calder is an English publisher and book editor.

<i>Quichotte</i> (novel) 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie

Quichotte is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel Don Quixote, Quichotte is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian-American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed.

References

  1. Kellaway, Lucy (14 July 1993). "Women at the Top, Female progress". The Financial Times.
  2. 1 2 "Author Approved Matt Seaton meets Frances Coady the new editorial director of Granta Books". Vogue Profile. January 1997.
  3. 1 2 "A new Vintage Liz Thomson chronicles the birth a new trade paperback imprint". Publishing News. June 1990.
  4. Who, Who's (25 January 2018). Who's who 2018 : an annual biographical dictionary (One hundred and seventieth year of issue ed.). [London]. ISBN   9781472935014. OCLC   1014181885.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. Cassell & the Publishers Association directory of publishing, 1990. Cassell Ltd. (Fifteenth ed.). London: Cassell. 1989. ISBN   978-0304318872. OCLC   21220244.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  6. "Change Makers". Publishers Weekly. 30 November 2009.
  7. "FRANCES COADY". ARAGI INC. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  8. Who's Who 2019. A & C Black Bloomsbury Publishing plc Oxford University Press. 2019.
  9. 1 2 "The History of Faber: 1980s". Faber & Faber Blog. Archived from the original on 8 July 2019. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  10. Who, Who's (25 January 2018). Who's who 2018 : an annual biographical dictionary (One hundred and seventieth year of issue ed.). [London]. ISBN   9781472935014. OCLC   1014181885.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  11. Faber, Toby (30 April 2019). Faber & Faber: The Untold Story of a Great Publishing House. Faber & Faber. ISBN   9780571339068.
  12. Phillips, Caryl (13 September 2017). The European Tribe. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN   9780525562801.
  13. "Top Cape job goes to Coady". Publishing News. 22 November 1987.
  14. "The Powers that Will Be". The Sunday Times Magazine. 22 November 1987.
  15. O'Kelly, Lisa (19 September 1990). "A paperback publisher raising its shelf-esteem". The Independent.
  16. ILMP 1990 : International literary market place ; 25th anniversary . R.R. Bowker Company. New York: R.R. Bowker Co. 1989. ISBN   978-0835226189. OCLC   20928914.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  17. 1 2 Durrant, Sabine (21 February 1994). "POWER & INFLUENCE IN THE ARTS: BOOKS / Contesting the cover charge". The Independent. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  18. "Full text of "Culture And Imperialism By Edward W. Said"". archive.org. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  19. Elie, Paul (29 April 2014). "Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis Recall Surviving the Satanic Verses Fatwa". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  20. "Looking back at Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses". The Guardian. 14 September 2012. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  21. McDonald, Russell (2016). "Harnessing the Currents of Textual Fluidity: Salman Rushdie's Making of East, West". Textual Cultures. 10 (2): 76–106. doi: 10.14434/textual.v10i2.19517 . ISSN   1559-2936. JSTOR   26514868.
  22. Pilger, John (2 September 2010). Distant Voices. Random House. ISBN   9781407086378.
  23. "New Roles for Callil, Coady at Random House". The Bookseller. 30 April 1993.
  24. Walsh, John (17 June 1995). "A WEEK IN BOOKS". The Independent. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  25. "About Granta Books". Granta Books. Archived from the original on 21 June 2016. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  26. "Change Makers: Frances Coady". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  27. Chabon, Michael (2000). The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Macmillan. ISBN   9780312282998.
  28. Neal (27 April 2007). "World Voices: Norway's Per Petterson Relaxes". Adweek GalleyCat.
  29. "Publishers Marketplace: Log In". www.publishersmarketplace.com. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  30. "People Round-Up, Early June 2015". Publishing Trends. 4 June 2015.
  31. Andriani, Lynn (30 November 2009). "Change Makers: Frances Coady". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  32. "Naomi Klein, Friedman Fighter | Naomi Klein". www.naomiklein.org. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  33. Klein, Naomi (1 April 2010). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN   9781429919487.
  34. McInerney, Jay (1 October 2009). "Book Review | 'Generosity: An Enhancement,' by Richard Powers". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  35. George, Lynell (11 May 2008). "Secrets that live in the Sunset". Los Angeles Times. ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  36. Woodroof, Martha (6 April 2010). "Deborah Eisenberg: City Life In The Smallest Spaces". NPR.org. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  37. "Esi Edugyan's Publishing Cinderella Story: Man Booker Prize Finalist ..." The New York Observer .
  38. Carr, David (18 September 2012). "Media Chiefs Form Venture to E Publish". The New York Times.
  39. Coffey, Michael (7 October 2013). "One Year Later, Coady's Atavist Books Set to Launch". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
  40. Kakutani, Michiko (2 April 2014). "Karen Russell's 'Sleep Donation'". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  41. "FRANCES COADY". Aragi Inc. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
  42. Brockes, Emma (16 March 2012). "Peter Carey: making it up as he goes along". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 20 May 2019.