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Sonny Mehta, Editor-in-Chief
Recognized with Lifetime Achievement Award at Inaugural Asian American Literary Festival
“Greatest editor of all time” has championed writers of color; will be honored at intimate gala dinner on November 13, 2009, featuring conversation with novelist Michael Ondaatje
The son of an Indian diplomat, Ajai Singh Mehta spent his childhood in India and Switzerland before moving to England to attend Cambridge. After briefly considering a career as a writer, he joined London publisher Paladin and made a splash in 1970 with the publication of the groundbreaking feminist tome The Female Eunuch, which he had encouraged his Cambridge classmate Germaine Greer to write. By 1972 Mehta was running paperback giant Pan Books, and he spent more than a decade and a half as one of the most prominent figures on the British publishing scene.
The opportunity to conquer the New York publishing market came in 1987 when Mehta got a call from then-Random House chairman Si Newhouse, who asked him to move to New York and take over Knopf, replacing editor Robert Gottlieb, who left to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker. Mehta accepted the job and moved stateside. Among the many notable authors Mehta has published are Haruki Murakami, Joan Didion, and John Updike.