The famous Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, DBE, FRSL was an Australian publisher, writer, and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.
Callil began as a campaigning outsider, founding the feminist imprint Virago Press, where she published contemporary bestsellers including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, and Angela Carter. She challenged the male-dominated canon of English literature by bringing back into print a list of modern classics by authors including Antonia White, Willa Cather, and Rebecca West, eventually becoming a pillar of the literary establishment. She was made a dame in 2017, served as a member of the Booker prize committee, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Born in Melbourne in 1938, Callil had a difficult childhood, which she later called her purgatory. She went to the same convent school as Germaine Greer she described the atmosphere as rules, censorship, and silence, and above all a sense of disapproval waiting to pounce on those rare times when you felt most entirely yourself. After studying at Melbourne University, she left Australia the week she graduated, arriving in London in 1960 to find it a very closed and silent place.
Carmen Callil illness: What Carmen Callil disease did have?
Callil died from leukemia at home in London on 17 October 2022, at the age of 84.
Callil’s early years in London were challenging, and she attempted to kill herself. After beginning the road to recovery with a therapist, in 1964 she placed an advert in the Times: Australian BA, typing, wants a job in publishing.
I got three offers and accepted one, she told the Australian Book Review, which was being a menial for a sponsored book editor at Hutchinson’s.
From there she moved into book publicity one of the few jobs then open to women who didn’t want to be secretaries before taking a job at Ink, an offshoot of Oz magazine. When it collapsed in 1972 she went freelance, working on the launch of the feminist magazine Spare Rib that summer. It was while sitting in a pub that the idea for a feminist publishing company came to her, like the switching on of a lightbulb.
