Carmen Therese Callil
(1938- ) 
Carmen Callil's father, of Irish-Lebanese extraction, was a barrister
and Lecturer in French at the University of Melbourne. He died when
she was nine years old.
Callil travelled to England after she graduated in Arts from Melbourne.
Inspired by her cousin, and "convinced that I could do anything",
Callil placed an advertisement in The Times in 1960 announcing "Australian
BA, typing: Wants job in publishing", and subsequently worked for
a succession of publishing houses.
The 1970s were revolutionary years in the history of feminist publishing
with Australian women well to the fore. In Melbourne, McPhee Gribble
and the associated imprint Sisters produced many titles by Australian
authors. In London, Germaine Greer took the world by storm with The
Female Eunuch and, in 1972, Callil established Virago, one of the most
influential and recognisable feminist imprints, with its beautifully
illustrated green covers.
Virago published new authors and republished many older works with critical
introductions, bringing new readers to such writers as Antonia White,
Edith Wharton, Angela Carter and E M Delafield. When Virago was acquired
by Cape, Chatto & The Bodley Head 10 years later, Callil was appointed
Chatto's Managing and Publishing Director. Virago became independent
again in 1987 following a management buy-out. In 1993-94 Callil was
briefly publisher-at-large for Random House.
In 1994, she was awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of
Sheffield, York, Oxford Brookes and The Open University. She chaired
the judging panel for the Booker Prize in 1996, the first Australian
to be entrusted with this task. She was a Director of Channel 4 Television
in 1985-91 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. In 1998,
angered by the Conservative government's choices on the national curriculum
for English, which she described as "stacked with bad poets",
she co-authored The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since
1950. She is currently finishing Darquier's Nebula: A Family at War,
a book about Vichy France and Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner
for Jewish Affairs in Pétain’s government,
and about his Australian and English family, to be published in 2003.
