Carmen Callil

Carmen Callil (born 1938) is an Australian author and the founder of Virago Press. She created the independent publishing house in 1972 and she continued to chair it until 1995. At Virago Carmen was responsible for the creation and development of the Virago modern classics list. She was also Publisher of Chatto & Windus & the Hogarth Press from 1982-1994.

Callil was born July 15, 1938 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to Frederick Alfred Louis Callil and Lorraine Claire Allen. She was educated at Star of the Sea Convent, Gardenvale, and Loreto Convent Mandeville Hall. Following matriculation from high school, she enroled at the University of Melbourne, where she graduated in Arts, and relocated to the United Kingdom in 1960. Shortly after moving, Callil attempted suicide after a failed relationship with a married man. Carmen Callil's mother was of Irish/English descent, her father of Lebanese extraction. He was a Barrister and Lecturer in French at the University of Melbourne, and died when she was nine years old. She was a Director of Channel 4 Television from 1985 to 1991.

In 2006, she published Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, a biography of Vichy figure Louis Darquier, whose daughter, the London psychiatrist Anne Darquier, had, until her suicide in 1970, been treating Callil since the latter's attempted suicide.

References

• "The enemies of free speech are everywhere", by Henry Porter in The Observer, 15 October 2006
• "French embassy cancels N.Y. book launch over author's Israel views", by Reuters in Haaretz, 10 October 2006
• "Vile days in Vichy", by Peter Conrad in The Observer, 26 March 2006