Christopher Colin MacLehose CBE,"Honours List: Order of the British Empire, CBE" , The Independent, 31 December 2010. Hon. FRSL (born 12 July 1940)Nicholas Wroe, "Christopher MacLehose: A life in publishing" , The Guardian, 28 December 2012. is a British publisher notable as publisher of Harvill Press (from 1984 to 2004),"Darja Marinšek presents Christopher MacLehose, MacLehose Press" , Frankfurter Buchmesse, 2016.Christopher MacLehose profile at London Book Fair.Christopher MacLehose, "A Publisher’s Vision", EnterText 4.3 Supplement, Brunel University London. . where his successes included bringing out the stories of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford for the first time in Britain.Sebastian Faulks, "My week" , The Observer, 12 April 2009. Having published works translated from more than 34 languages,"MacLehose Press Publishing Programme" , Creative Europe Desk UK. MacLehose has been referred to as "the champion of translated fiction" and as "British publishing's doyen of literature in translation".The Literator, "Cover Stories: Christopher MacLehose" , The Independent, 28 September 2006. He is generally credited with introducing to an English-speaking readership the best-selling Swedish author Stieg LarssonJoshua Melvin, "French crime fiction set to eclipse Scandi-noir" , AFP–The Local, 20 February 2014.Helen Rowe, "After ScandiNoir, French are new crime fiction stars" , DAWN, 24 February 2014.Gaby Wood, "How Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante won us over" , The Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2016.Henry Williams, "Old is the new young, which is great news for idlers like me" , The Spectator, 3 August 2016. and other prize-winning authors, among them Sergio De La Pava, who has described MacLehose as "an outsize figure literally and figuratively – that's an individual who has devoted his life to literature".Susanna Rustin, "Sergio De La Pava: 'My book's not perfect, but it's what I set out to do. I wanted it to have a propulsive, angry core'" , The Guardian, 27 June 2014.
From 2008 to 2020, he was the publisher of MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Books, and in 2021 founded Mountain Leopard Press, an imprint of the Welbeck Publishing Group. The Mountain Lion list was sold to Hachette in December 2022. In 2024, it was announced that MacLehose was to launch Open Borders Press, as the first imprint of Orenda Books.
Early life Christopher MacLehose was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 12 July 1940 to Alexander MacLehose and Elizabeth Hope MacLehose (née Bushell). His family was involved with the book trade as printers, booksellers and publishers, and he has described them as "seven generations, all of them second sons". He was educated at Shrewsbury School (1953–58),The Salopian, Issue 148, Summer 2011, p. 41. and read history at Worcester College, Oxford University."MacLehose, Christopher Colin" , Who's Who & Who Was Who, Oxford University Press, 2014. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
Career MacLehose took a job at the Glasgow Herald, where he hoped to stay for six months to gain the experience that would enable him to work for the recently founded Independent Television News; however, his ambitions changed direction after a few weeks: "I realised ... I wanted to work with language and words," MacLehose said in a 2012 interview. So he worked in the editorial office of the family printing factory by day, while freelancing by night for The Herald writing reviews and obituaries. Eventually, he was offered employment as literary editor of The Scotsman, following which he moved in 1967 to London and went into book publishing, initially as an editor at the Cresset Press (part of the Barrie Group), with P. G. Wodehouse among his authors,Anthony Gardner, "Christopher MacLehose: The champion of translated fiction who struck it rich with Stieg Larsson" , 2010. as well as George MacDonald Fraser of Flashman fame, who had been the features editor of the Glasgow Herald when MacLehose was there.Christopher MacLehose, "The derring-do that created Flashman" , The Spectator, 24 May 2014. MacLehose subsequently became editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and then editor-in-chief of William Collins.Hrvoje Bozicevic, "The life and death of Harvill Press: Save the Leopard!" , Literature & Translation, UNESCO, 17 November 2004.Lucinda Byatt, "At two ends of the publishing continuum: Harvill Secker's celebrates its (cumulative) centenary and Vagabond Voices", A World of Words, 1 October 2009. .
In 1984, MacLehose took charge of the Harvill imprint, of which he was publisher for the next 20 years, with a well respected list that specialised in translated works and included such titles as Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Under his leadership, between 1998 and 2005, Harvill Press published a numbered series of books, known as the Leopard Series due to the series emblem (the initial series ran up to number 310 and was revived in 2020).https://300oddleopards.wordpress.com/ In 1995, MacLehose led a management buy-out of Harvill and for the following seven years characterised the company as "a bridge across cultures",Andrew Franklin, "From Small Beginnings" , The Independent, 11 May 1996. counting among his authors Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago, Georges Perec, Claudio Magris and P. O. Enquist.Baret Magariani, "Patrician hauteur. Interview – Christopher MacLehose" , New Statesman, 26 February 1999. In 2002, the company was bought by Random House"Harvill press joins The Random House Group" , PR Newswire.Hilary Macaskill, "Adapting to acquisition", The Bookseller, 13 August 2003. and two years later MacLehose left.Michael Thwaite, "MacLehose joins with Quercus" , Ready Steady Book, 21 September 2006.
He then set up the MacLehose Press, whose motto is "Read the World",Sam Leith, "Leith on language: Found in translation" , Prospect, 16 March 2017 (April issue). as "an independently minded imprint" of Quercus Books (itself founded in 2004)."About us" , Quercus. The first titles were published in January 2008,Joshua Farrington, "MacLehose Press celebrates fifth anniversary", The Bookseller, 21 December 2012. . and among these was the best-selling psychological thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson."What publishers can do when a best-selling author dies", BBC News, 23 December 2013. Other international authors published by MacLehose Press include Bernardo Atxaga,"A Basque writer contemplates America" , The Economist, 10 August 2017. Dulce Maria Cardoso,"#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews THE RETURN by Dulce Maria Cardoso", European Literature Network, 15 September 2017. . Philippe Claudel,Boyd Tonkin, "Philippe Claudel wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize" , The Independent, 13 May 2010. Otto de Kat, Maylis de Kerangal, Virginie Despentes, Joël Dicker,Liz Bury, "Dan Brown-trumping French bestseller due in English next year", The Guardian, 6 December 2013. .Katherine Cowdrey, "'Harry Quebert' companion novel to MacLehose", The Bookseller, 19 July 2016. . Sophie Divry, Per Olov Enquist, Roy Jacobsen, Jaan Kross, Andrey Kurkov, David Lagercrantz, Pierre Lemaitre, Élmer Mendoza, Patrick Modiano, Marie NDiaye, Daniel Pennac, Lydie Salvayre, Żanna Słoniowska, and Valerio Varesi.Ian Thomson, "Modern Italy’s heart of darkness" , The Spectator, 26 March 2016."Books" , MacLehose Press. On 30 October 2020, MacLehose Press announced that MacLehose had chosen to leave the imprint. Associate publisher Katharina Bielenberg took over as publisher.
In March 2021, it was announced that MacLehose would be leading a new imprint at the Welbeck Publishing Group called Mountain Leopard Press, with a focus on literary work and translated literature, the launch title being Evelio Rosero's Stranger to the Moon, translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean.John Self, "Reinvention and rediscoveries", The Critic, June 2022. In December 2022 the Mountain Leopard list was sold by Welback to Hachette.
In January 2024, it was announced that MacLehose would be launching Open Borders Press, the first imprint of Orenda Books, with Andrey Kurkov's Our Daily War as the imprint's first title.
With "a reputation as a master at finding foreign fiction by writers such as Henning Mankell and Haruki Murakami and turning them into English language hits",Nick Clark, "The publishing house that Stieg Larsson built", The Independent, 5 August 2010. . MacLehose has said: "When I first came into publishing, there was André Deutsch, Fredric Warburg, Ernest Hecht, Manya Harari, George Weidenfeld – a generation of multilingual people who came to England bringing the assumption that books that had to be translated were no different.... You simply published the best you could find and if you had to translate them, you just got on with it."Andrew Jack, "Translators: Publishing’s unsung heroes at work", Financial Times, 6 October 2015. .
Awards and honours In 2006, MacLehose received the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award for International Publishing."Lifetime Achievement Award" , Trilogy, 12 January 2005.Lifetime Achievement Award, London Book Fair.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the publishing industry in the 2011 New Year Honours."New Year Honours—United Kingdom" , The London Gazette, 31 December 2010, Supplement No. 1, p. 8.Graeme Neill, "Weidenfeld and MacLehose lauded in New Year's Honours list", The Bookseller, 4 January 2011. .
In 2016, MacLehose was awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature (RSL)."The Benson Medal", The Royal Society of Literature. . He was elected an honorary Fellow of the RSL in 2021."Christopher MacLehose", RSL Fellows, The Royal Society of Literature.
MacLehose received Estonia's Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, IV Class, in 2023.
References
External links MacLehose Press official website. "Christopher MacLehose on Editorial Identity Part 1" and "Christopher MacLehose on Editorial Identity Part 2", LiteratureNorthwest, 15 January 2013. YouTube video. Tom Tivnan, "Quality control helps fiction from afar punch above its weight, says MacLehose", The Bookseller, 27 June 2018. "Meet the Writers: Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy with Georgina Godwin", 4 September 2021.