Penguin Books Limited is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with
his brothers Richard
and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the
following year.
Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through
Woolworths and other
stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success
showed that large
audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly
through its books
concerning politics, the arts, and science.
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013
by its merger with
American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Formerly,
Penguin Group was
wholly owned by British Pearson plc, the global media company which also owned the Financial Times.
When Penguin
Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47% stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25% in
July 2017. Since April
2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is one of the
largest English-language
publishers known as the Big Five, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and
Simon & Schuster.
Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England.
Elda Rotor (she/her) is Vice President and Publisher for Penguin Classics. She oversees the U.S. classics publishing program including the works of John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. Elda originated several series including the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, Penguin Vitae, Penguin Liberty, Penguin Drop Caps, Penguin Orange Collection, Penguin Horror with Guillermo del Toro, Penguin Civic Classics, and a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. She was a founding member of the PRH DEI Council and led the Penguin Publishing Group Diversity Committee. She is a board member for the Academy of American Poets and an advisory board member of Kundiman, a national organization dedicated to Asian American creative writing. She published People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated by Tiffany Tsao, winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize. In 2013, she co-produced and narrated Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, named one of the Best Apps of the Year by Apple. For Penguin Books and Viking, she edited the Lambda Literary Award finalist Fairest by Meredith Talusan, Legendary Children by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, and the New York Times-bestselling The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama. She has worked with a wide range of contributors including Gene Luen Yang, Nnedi Okorafor, Leigh Bardugo, Kevin Young, Jason Reynolds, Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Wilson, Mahogany L. Browne, Sofia Coppola, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patti Smith, Victor LaValle, Elaine Castillo, Tom Perrotta, Rebecca Mead, James Earl Jones, Lynn Nottage, David Simon, Jeff VanderMeer, and Lois Lowry. Prior to Penguin, Elda was a Senior Editor at Oxford University Press.
John Siciliano (he/him) is an executive editor acquiring for Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, Penguin Life, and Viking. He has brought to the Penguin Classics list many new titles from around the world―in translations from Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic—as well as new editions of American classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudolfo Anaya, and Julia Alvarez, including a New York Times bestselling edition of Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. He published Lydia Davis's award-winning, nationally bestselling translation of Madame Bovary and conceived of the Penguin Christmas Classics, Penguin Galaxy, and a series of African American classics and Asian American classics. Among the writers he has commissioned introductory essays from are Neil Gaiman, Ibram X. Kendi, Rupi Kaur, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Maxine Hong Kingston. For Penguin Books, Penguin Life, and Viking, his list includes one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2018, The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani; the New York Times bestseller The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker; the Man Booker International Prize finalist Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi; and the multimillion-copy international bestsellers The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim and Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. He has participated in editorial fellowships in Jerusalem, Istanbul, Sofia, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Salzburg, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Sharjah, Tokyo, and Taipei.
John Siciliano (he/him) is an executive editor acquiring for Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, Penguin Life, and Viking. He has brought to the Penguin Classics list many new titles from around the world―in translations from Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic—as well as new editions of American classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudolfo Anaya, and Julia Alvarez, including a New York Times bestselling edition of Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. He published Lydia Davis's award-winning, nationally bestselling translation of Madame Bovary and conceived of the Penguin Christmas Classics, Penguin Galaxy, and a series of African American classics and Asian American classics. Among the writers he has commissioned introductory essays from are Neil Gaiman, Ibram X. Kendi, Rupi Kaur, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Maxine Hong Kingston. For Penguin Books, Penguin Life, and Viking, his list includes one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2018, The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani; the New York Times bestseller The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker; the Man Booker International Prize finalist Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi; and the multimillion-copy international bestsellers The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim and Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. He has participated in editorial fellowships in Jerusalem, Istanbul, Sofia, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Salzburg, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Sharjah, Tokyo, and Taipei.
Executive Editor Nina Shield joined TarcherPerigee and Avery in 2017 with a focus on prescriptive non-fiction. Nina acquires inspiration, self-improvement, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, wellness, workbook/journals, mental health, functional medicine, parenting, and cookbooks and nutritional resources. Authors she has worked with include James Clear (New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits), John McWhorter (New York Times bestseller Nine Nasty Words), Ali Maffucci, Megan McNamee and Judy Delaware (New York Times bestseller Feeding Littles and Beyond), Gabor Maté, MD (New York Times bestseller The Myth of Normal), Bishop Michael Curry (Love is the Way), Alexandra Caspero and Whitney English (The Plant-Based Baby and Toddler), Jordan Reid and Erin Williams (The Big Fat Activity Book for Pregnant People, The Big Activity Book for Anxious People), Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde (How We Learn to Be Brave), Gabriela Herstik (Inner Witch), Kelly McGonigal (The Joy of Movement), Talia Pollock (Party in Your Plants), Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire), Jason Dearen (Kill Shot), Emily Winter (One Day Smarter), Matt McCarthy, MD (Superbugs), and Joe Saul-Sehy and Emily Guy Birken (Stacked).
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