London literary publisher founded by Victoria Barnsley in 1984 and part of HarperCollins since 2000, home of Mantel's Wolf Hall. Many of its American titles are UK firsts that followed a US first.
Fourth Estate is a publisher active from 1987. We track 122 editions it published between 1987 and 2026, 31 of them first editions across 120 books. How Fourth Estate marked its first editions is set out below, with a checker for the year on your title page.
Fourth Estate, often styled 4th Estate, is a London literary publisher founded by Victoria Barnsley in Notting Hill in 1984, starting out as an independent with very little money behind it.
HarperCollins bought the company in 2000. At that point Fourth Estate had annual sales of roughly 7.5 million pounds, 36 staff and about 100 new titles a year. Barnsley became chief executive and publisher of HarperCollins UK, and HarperCollins talked of launching a Fourth Estate imprint in the United States. The imprint now works from the HarperCollins offices in the News Building at London Bridge.
The list combines literary fiction with biography, polemic, science and cookery. Its most celebrated books are Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels: Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies both won the Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman and the first British writer to win it twice. Fourth Estate is also the British home of several leading American novelists, among them Annie Proulx, whose The Shipping News it published in London in 1994, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides. Other names on the list include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anthony Doerr, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Nigel Slater, Matt Ridley and Ben Goldacre.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Fourth Estate's practice for the year on your title page.
Spot the edition: Copyright page, number line: the number sequence is complete and includes 1 (first printing)
1990s - Books by American authors are often UK firsts that came after an American first. The Shipping News first appeared from Scribner in the United States in 1993, so the 1994 Fourth Estate edition is the first UK edition, not the true first. 2000s to 2010s - The first UK printing of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) was withdrawn and pulped because an uncorrected text had gone to press by mista
We track 122 editions published by Fourth Estate, 31 of them first editions, across 120 books.
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 22 October 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.
