Collins Harvill

About Collins Harvill

Collins Harvill is the name used on books from the Harvill Press while it was owned by the publisher William Collins, the partnership that brought out the first English edition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in 1958.

Harvill was founded in London in 1946 (one account says 1947) by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers, who had worked together on a wartime intelligence desk dealing with Russia; the name joins their surnames. They set out to repair cultural ties broken by the war, above all between Russia and the West, and Harari became a prolific translator of Russian writers into English. Collins absorbed the firm, and books appeared under the joint Collins and Harvill names. Highlights include Doctor Zhivago (1958, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari), Lampedusa's The Leopard in the same year, Joy Adamson's Born Free (1960) and a 1968 English translation of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle.

Christopher MacLehose took charge of Harvill in 1984 and, after HarperCollins let the list go, led it back to independence through a management buyout in the mid 1990s. Random House bought Harvill in 2002, and in 2005 it was combined with Secker & Warburg as Harvill Secker, now an imprint of Vintage within Penguin Random House.