Canongate

About Canongate

Canongate is an independent publisher based in Edinburgh, founded in 1973 by Stephanie and Angus Wolfe Murray and named after the city's Canongate district.

It began as a specialist press for books of Scottish interest, and its most important early author was Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark Canongate first published on 25 February 1981. In 1994 Jamie Byng led a management buyout of the business from the receiver, backed by Christopher Bland and Charlie McVeigh, and he has headed the company since.

Under Byng, Canongate published the UK edition of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, first published in Canada in 2001, which won the Booker Prize in 2002. Its list also includes Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, David Simon's Homicide and The Corner, Ruth Ozeki's Women's Prize winner The Book of Form and Emptiness and Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Its Myths series asked contemporary writers to retell ancient myths, among them Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and Jeanette Winterson's Weight.

Canongate was named Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2003 and 2009 and has offices in Edinburgh and London. It runs a US imprint with Grove Atlantic, sold its majority stake in Australia's Text Publishing in 2011, and in 2024 became the first UK trade publisher certified as a B Corp. It remains independent.