About Peter Owen Publishers
Peter Owen started his company, aged twenty-four, six years after the Second World War.
He ran the business from home, with a typewriter as his only equipment. Soon, however, the company started to flourish, enabling him to employ some staff, his first editor was Muriel Spark, and he was able to bring some of the very best international literature to what was a very insular British market.
In the fifty years since then, although the industry has changed beyond recognition, Peter Owen Publishers continues the tradition of producing new and interesting writing. The company has published seven Nobel Prize winners and boasts a backlist that includes some of the most talented and important writers from all over the world.
What People Have Said About Us
‘Never has an investment of £900 produced such vast riches.’ — J.G. Ballard
‘I have admired Peter Owen and his lone stand for years. He has published books that otherwise would not have been published. We owe a great debt to him and the few like him.’ — Doris Lessing
‘It is delightful and refreshing to find Peter Owen almost as I remember him four decades ago, still one of the few remaining beacons of independence. Long may he and his house flourish.’ — Christopher Foyle, Foyle's Bookshop
'A maverick who seems to break all the rules but might, I suspect, simply be publishing books the way they used to be published before the big money arrived and will be published again when the big money has gone.’ — Dan Franklin, Daily Telegraph
'A publishing impresario for whom books are global . . . We owe him the explosions not only of the only Catholic Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo, but of Jane Bowles, James Purdy, Americans of shock genius and a host of translated Europeans, from Hermann Hesse to Chagall and Colette.’ — Mail on Sunday
Keith Cunningham: The Graphic Economist
While working for Peter Owen, Keith Cunningham created covers of great simplicity and effectiveness. Using found imagery and photograms, he produced a stream of graphic covers with utter economy. Read the full text of Mike Dempsey's appreciation of Cunningham's achievements, as published in Design Week, by clicking here.
Book Offer - Everything is Nice
To purchase Everything is Nice, The Peter Owen 50th Anniversary Anthology
at the special price of only £5 please contact sales@peterowen.com.