Sylvia Whitman Hon. FRSL | |
|---|---|
 Whitman outside Shakespeare and Company (2008) | |
| Born | 1 April 1981 (age 43) Paris, France |
| Alma mater | University College London |
| Occupation | Bookseller |
| Parent | George Whitman |
Sylvia Whitman Hon. FRSL (1 April 1981) [1] is the proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France, the celebrated bohemian bookstore known for welcoming readers and writers from around the world.
She is the daughter of the shop's founder, George Whitman (1913–2011).
Whitman, born in 1981 in Paris, [2] is the only child of George Whitman (1913–2011), who in 1951 founded the Shakespeare and Company bookstore located at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in Paris. Her mother was Felicity Leng, a young British woman who had a brief marriage with George. [3] [4] According to author Jeremy Mercer, she was named after St. Sylvia, but George soon started maintaining she was named after Sylvia Beach, [4] who had opened the original Shakespeare and Company (1919–1941), [5] [6] [7] and he stated in one bookstore publication that her name was Sylvia Beach Whitman. [4]
When she was 7, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to England and became estranged from her father for many years. [8] She attended boarding school [2] at the Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh, graduating in 1999. [9]
She attended University College London, graduating in 2002 with a B.A. in Eastern European History. [10] Her original ambition was to be an actress. [8]
She began co-managing Shakespeare and Company with her father in 2003 at the age of 21. [11] She continues to run it today with her partner, David Delannet, in the same manner her father had, allowing young writers to live in the bookstore in exchange for helping out around the shop, agreeing to read a book a day, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop's archives. An estimated 30,000 people have stayed at the shop. [12]
In 2003, Whitman founded a biennial literary festival, FestivalandCo, which has hosted such writers as Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jeanette Winterson, Jung Chang, and Marjane Satrapi. [13]
In 2010, Shakespeare and Company launched The Paris Literary Prize for unpublished novellas, with a 10,000 euro prize donated by the de Groot Foundation. The winner of the first competition was Rosa Rankin-Gee, whose entry was subsequently published by Virago. [14]
Partnering with Bob's Bake Shop, Whitman and David Delannet opened a café in 2015, located next door to the shop in what had been an abandoned garage since 1981. The Shakespeare and Company Café serves primarily vegetarian food, with vegan and gluten-free options. [15]
In 2016, the bookstore published its own history in a book titled Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart (edited by Krista Halverson), which features an epilogue by Whitman, as well as a foreword by Jeanette Winterson. [16]
In 2023, Whitman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [17]
Whitman appears, alongside her father, in the 2003 documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man . [18]
She appeared on the three Paris episodes of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson , which aired the first week of August 2011. [19]
She is the subject of a 2012 episode of Sundance Beginnings, documentary shorts directed by Chiara Clemente. [20] [21] [22]
She appears in an episode of the BBC television series Imagine , first broadcast in 2012: "Jeanette Winterson: My Monster and Me". [23]
She is featured in the three-part 2014 BBC television documentary series Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities by art historian James Fox in episode 2: "Paris 1928". [24]
Sylvia Beach, born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.
Jeanette Winterson is an English author.
Adrienne Monnier was a French bookseller, writer, and publisher, and an influential figure in the modernist writing scene in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a novel by Jeanette Winterson published in 1985 by Pandora Press. It is a coming-of-age story about a lesbian who grows up in an English Pentecostal community. Key themes of the book include transition from youth to adulthood, complex family relationships, same-sex relationships, organised religion and the concept of faith.
George Whitman was an American bookseller who lived most of his life in France. He was the founder and proprietor of the second Shakespeare and Company, which was named after Sylvia Beach's celebrated original bookstore of the same name on Paris's Left Bank. He was a contemporary of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell, as well as a lifelong friend of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Elizabeth Jean Spriggs was an English character actress.
Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookstore opened in 1951 by George Whitman, located on Paris's Left Bank.
Shakespeare and Company, Shakespeare & Company, or Shakespeare & Co. may refer to:
Patricia Olive "Pat" Kavanagh was a British literary agent.
Noël Riley Fitch is an American biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of several books on Paris as well as three biographies: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian and French; Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (1993), published in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish, and nominated for the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle; and she is the first authorized biographer of Julia Child, with Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child (1997). The Ernest Hemingway book, a biographical and geographical study of his Paris years, has been published in Dutch, the Cafés of Paris book in Dutch and German.
Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man is a 2003 documentary film directed by Benjamin Sutherland and Gonzague Pichelin. It is about George Whitman who opened a bookshop-commune in Paris in 1951 called Shakespeare and Company.
The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.
FestivalandCo is a literary festival held in Paris, France at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.
The Rue de l'Odéon is a street in the Odéon quarter of the 6th arrondissement of Paris on the Left Bank.
The Hogarth Shakespeare project was an effort by Hogarth Press to retell works by William Shakespeare for a more modern audience. To do this, Hogarth commissioned well-known writers to select and re-imagine the plays.
Scarlett Sabet is an English poet and performer based in London. She is the author of four poetry collections, Rocking Underground (2014), The Lock And The Key (2016), Zoreh (2018), and Camille (2019). In 2019 she released Catalyst, a spoken word album produced by her partner, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
Stratford-on-Odéon was both a literary circle and James Joyce's affectionate nickname for the Rue de l'Odéon in Paris's Left Bank, its two bookstores and the "coterie of emergent Anglophone writers surrounding them".
Shakespeare and Company was an influential English-language bookstore in Paris founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919; Beach published James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses at the bookstore. The store closed in 1941.
The Second Shelf is an independent bookshop in Soho, London with a focus on rare or rediscovered women's literature. It was founded in 2018 as a feminist bookshop. It also operates as an online bookshop. The name "The Second Shelf" comes from the title of Meg Wolitzer's 2012 essay in The New York Times Book Review about sexism towards women's fiction. It is a reference to The Second Sex, a book by Simone de Beauvoir.
They named her Sylvia Whitman after St. Sylvia, but George soon started telling people it was in honor of the founder of the first Shakespeare and Company and even referred to the little girl as Sylvia Beach Whitman in a bookstore publication.
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