Spiegel & Grau

About Spiegel & Grau

Spiegel & Grau is a New York publisher founded by the editors Cindy (Celina) Spiegel and Julie Grau, first as an imprint within the Random House group in the mid-2000s and, since its revival, as an independent house.

Sources differ on the start date: Wikipedia gives 2005, the publisher's own website says it was established in 2006, and Wikidata records 2008. Its Random House years produced several prize-winning non-fiction books. Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (July 2015) won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Kirkus Prize and was a Pulitzer finalist. Bryan Stevenson and Piper Kerman were also on its list.

In January 2019 Penguin Random House announced that it was closing the imprint and that the founders would leave, a move the New York Times attributed to corporate restructuring. Spiegel and Grau then relaunched the company as an independent publisher, planning 15 to 20 books a year alongside audiobooks and podcasts; Wikipedia dates the relaunch to 2020, while the company dates its independence to 2021. Its first independent book was Catherine Raven's Fox and I (2021), and later titles include Shelley Read's Go as a River and Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows.