Owen

About Owen

Peter Owen Publishers (often credited simply as "Owen" or "P. Owen") is an independent London literary publisher founded in 1951 by Peter Owen, known for translated fiction and for first publishing Anna Kavan's Ice (1967) and Anita Desai's debut novel Cry, the Peacock (1963).

Peter Owen (1927 to 2016) was born Peter Offenstadt in Nuremberg and had worked for Stanley Unwin at The Bodley Head before starting his own list with £850 of capital. Muriel Spark was his first editor. From the start the firm specialised in books in translation, and it published Nobel laureates (seven in all) including Hermann Hesse, Octavio Paz, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shusaku Endo, as well as Anaïs Nin, Paul and Jane Bowles, Yukio Mishima, Colette, Gertrude Stein and Cesare Pavese. By the 1990s the house had about 80 titles in print, 50 of them translations.

Kavan's Ice appeared from Peter Owen in the UK in 1967, a year before the American edition.Desai's Cry, the Peacock, her first novel, is recorded as published by P. Owen in London in 1963.

Peter Owen was appointed OBE in 2014 and ran the business until 2015, when he passed it to his daughter Antonia Owen and son-in-law Nick Kent. Pushkin Press acquired the company in 2022. An archive of the firm's papers is held by the University of Reading, and further records by the University of Delaware.