Andre Deutsch

About Andre Deutsch

André Deutsch Ltd is a London publishing house founded in the early 1950s by the Hungarian-born André Deutsch, with Diana Athill as a founding director, and it was the original British publisher of V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961).

Deutsch, born in Budapest in 1917, settled in Britain in 1939 and learned the trade at Aldor Publications and Nicholson & Watson. After the war he founded Allan Wingate, but was forced out by a fellow director and started again under his own name; sources give 1951 or 1952, with Athill dating her directorship to 1952.

Athill, who stayed until 1993, edited many of the house's authors, among them Naipaul, Jean Rhys, John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Margaret Atwood. The firm also published Jack Kerouac, Wole Soyinka, Art Spiegelman, Ogden Nash and Quentin Blake, along with series such as The Language Library and Grafton Books on librarianship, bibliography and book collecting.

In 1984 Deutsch agreed to share control with Tom Rosenthal, who was to take over when Deutsch reached 70; the two fell out, the children's list was sold in 1990 and Rosenthal put the firm up for sale. In 2000 the firm was sold to Video Collection International and the André Deutsch name became an imprint of Carlton Publishing Group, whose purchase The Bookseller reported that October; Welbeck Publishing Group acquired Carlton in April 2019. Deutsch died in London on 11 April 2000. The publishing archive is at the University of Tulsa, with a further collection at Oxford Brookes University.