Del Rey

About Del Rey

Del Rey is the science fiction and fantasy imprint launched by Ballantine Books in 1977 under Judy-Lynn del Rey and her husband, the author Lester del Rey, and now part of Penguin Random House.

Judy-Lynn del Rey joined Ballantine in 1973 from Galaxy magazine and hired Lester in 1975 to build a fantasy list. When Ballantine gave her an imprint of her own in 1977, she ran it and its marketing while Lester edited the fantasy authors. The first new novel under the name was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara (1977), chosen by Lester as an epic with appeal to Tolkien readers; Random House issued the hardback and Ballantine a trade paperback at the same time, and it became one of the imprint's early best sellers. Judy-Lynn also secured the novelisation rights to Star Wars, the start of a long run of tie-in publishing. She died in 1986.

Authors associated with the imprint include Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey (the Dragonriders of Pern), Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Naomi Novik and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic appeared in 2020. Del Rey is now an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann.