Harvill Press

About Harvill Press

The Harvill Press was a London publisher of literature in translation, founded just after the Second World War by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers, and remembered for publishing the English translation of Doctor Zhivago in 1958.

Harari and Villiers had worked together on the Russian desk of British intelligence during the war, and they set out to restore the cultural ties the war had broken, above all between Russia and the West. Harari co-translated Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago with Max Hayward, and Harvill's list also came to include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, later honoured in the leopard emblem of a Harvill series. Harvill was absorbed by William Collins, which became part of HarperCollins in 1989.

Christopher MacLehose took charge in 1984 and made Harvill a leading home for international fiction, publishing writers such as W. G. Sebald, José Saramago, Georges Perec, Claudio Magris and the author of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, alongside The Master and Margarita and American authors including Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. In 1995 he led a management buyout with private backers that made the firm independent again, and Harvill built up a numbered series under the Leopard name that ran to 310 titles.

Random House bought Harvill in 2002, and in 2005 it was merged with Secker & Warburg to form Harvill Secker, now an imprint of Vintage within Penguin Random House UK. MacLehose later left to join the publisher Quercus.