Parent company Orion Publishing Group Publication types Books Parent organization Orion Publishing Group Headquarters location London, United Kingdom Fiction genre Fiction | Country of origin United Kingdom Official website orionbooks.co.uk Founded 1949 Headquarters London, United Kingdom Imprint Everyman Paperbacks | |
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Nonfiction topics History, biography, celebrity, fiction, illustrated books. Fiction genres Fiction and non-fiction Founders George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld, Nigel Nicolson | ||
Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd (established 1948), often shortened to W&N or Weidenfeld, is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. Since 1991 it has been a division of the Orion Publishing Group.
History
George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson founded Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1948 and among many other significant books published Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1959) and Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (1973), a frank biography of his mother, Vita Sackville-West and father Harold Nicolson. In its early years Weidenfeld also published nonfiction works by Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Rose Macaulay, and novels by Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Later it published titles by world leaders and historians, along with contemporary fiction and glossy illustrated books.
Weidenfeld was one of Orion's first acquisitions after the group's founding in 1991, and formed the core of its offerings. At that time Weidenfeld imprints included Phoenix, its own establishment much earlier; and J. M. Dent, acquired in 1988, and thus its Everyman series. Orion was acquired in turn by Hachette Livre in 1998. The hardcover rights to Everyman Library were sold in 1991, and survive as a Random House property, paperbacks Everyman Classics continued under Orion.
Late in 2013, W&N published the British edition (and Hachette subsidiary Little, Brown the American edition) of I am Malala, the memoir of Pakistani-born teenager Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb. Malala Yousafzai is a female education activist, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2014.