Mary-Kay Wilmers

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Mary-Kay Wilmers (born July 19, 1938 in Chicago ) is a British publicist and was the editor of the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2015 .

Life

Mary-Kay Wilmers grew up in New York City . Her father came from a German-English, middle-class family, her mother from the Russian-Jewish family of the Eitingon, including the Leipzig tobacco shop Chaim Eitingon and his son, the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon . Wilmers published a family story , The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story , in 2009 , which was also published in French in 2013.

After the war her father ran an energy company in Belgium, and she attended a French-speaking school in Brussels and boarding school in England. She then studied modern languages ​​from 1957 at St Hugh's College , Oxford . In 1968 Wilmers and the director Stephen Frears married , they have two sons, but were divorced in the 1970s. The son Sam, with whom she lives in Primrose Hill today (2015) , has Riley Day Syndrome . Nina Stibbe was employed by her as a nanny from 1982 to 1989 . Stibbe's book about this time became a bestseller in England in 2013 and was filmed by the BBC in 2015 with a script by Nick Hornby . Helena Bonham Carter plays the role of Mary-Kay Wilmers in it.

From 1960 she worked for the publishing house Faber & Faber , where she was responsible for the publication of Eva Figes ' Freud book Patriarchal Habits , with which the feminist literature of the 1970s in England began. Since 1970 she worked for Karl Miller in the literary magazine of the BBC The Listener and was also briefly employed at The Times Literary Supplement (TLS). She went to Miller when he founded the London Review of Books (LRB) with the support of the New York Review of Books (NYREV) in 1979 after the TLS was closed . When NYREV cut back its involvement in 1980, Wilmers became a partner in the LRB with money from her paternal inheritance and over time acquired the majority of the shares.

Wilmers became co-editor in 1988 and sole editor in 1992 of the LRB, which operates in the heavily loss-making business and is subsidized from Wilmers' family fortune, the family loans are estimated at £ 35 million after 35 years. As a literary editor, she has positively influenced the career start of a number of authors: Julian Barnes , Alan Bennett , Seamus Heaney , Alan Hollinghurst , John Lanchester , Ian McEwan , Craig Raine , Salman Rushdie , Colm Tóibín , Tariq Ali . The LRB political line was inconsistent. Wilmers gave space to critics of British involvement in the 2003 Iraq war as well as critics of Israeli politics.

2008 edited Andrew O'Hagan with Bad Character a book's 70th birthday Wilmers. In 2015 Wilmers withdrew from the operational business at LRB. In 2018 she was elected an honorary member of the British Academy .

literature

  • Mary-Kay Wilmers: The Eitingons: a twentieth-century story . London; New York: Verso, 2010
  • Nina Stibbe : Love, Nina: Despatches From Family Life . London: Penguin Viking, 2013
  • Andrew O'Hagan (Ed.): Bad character: a tribute to Mary-Kay Wilmers . London: London Review of Books, 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Boyd Tonkin: Mary-Kay Wilmers: London's mythical urban elite made flesh , in: The Independent , February 22, 2013
  2. ↑ a b Kate Kellaway : Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe - review , in: The Guardian , November 10, 2013
  3. ^ A b c Lucy Kellaway : "You can't mention that" , Interview, in: Financial Times , August 29, 2015, p. 3
  4. ^ Sinclair McKay: The London Review of Books celebrated its 30th Birthday , in: The Daily Telegraph , October 30, 2009


personal data
SURNAME Wilmers, Mary-Kay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British publicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago