Mary-Kay Wilmers

Mary-Kay Wilmers was born in Chicago, Illinois, to British-German-Russian parents, and spent her early childhood in Long Island, New York. In 1946, the family moved to Europe, and she was educated in Brussels and at boarding school in England. She read modern languages at Oxford University, where she became a friend of Alan Bennett. After graduating, she got a job with the publishing house Faber & Faber, at first as a secretary, then rose to become an editor. Among her authors was Eva Figes, whom she commissioned to write Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), one of the early key British feminist books. At age 29, Mary-Kay left Faber to become deputy editor of The Listener, and in the 1970s worked at The Times Literary Supplement. In 1979, she co-founded the London Review of Books (LRB), an offshoot of the New York Review of Books, now the largest-selling literary publication in Europe. She became co-editor in 1988 and editor in 1992. As an editor, she has worked closely with many now-famous writers, often publishing them at the beginning of their literary careers, including Alan Bennett, Oliver Sacks, Jenny Diski, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, and Colm Tóibín. She has also written for the New Review, and The New Yorker. In 1968, she married film director Stephen Frears, with whom she had two sons; the couple later divorced. In 2009, she published The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story, an account of her mother's extended Russian Jewish family.