Christopher Colin MacLehoseCBE,[1] Hon. FRSL (born 12 July 1940)[2][3] is a British publisher notable as publisher of Harvill Press (from 1984 to 2004),[4][5][6] where his successes included bringing out the stories of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford for the first time in Britain.[7] Having published works translated from more than 34 languages,[8] MacLehose has been referred to as "the champion of translated fiction"[9] and as "British publishing's doyen of literature in translation".[10] He is generally credited with introducing to an English-speaking readership the best-selling Swedish author Stieg Larsson[11][12][13][14] and other prize-winning authors, among them Sergio De La Pava, who has described MacLehose as "an outsize figure literally and figuratively – that's an individual who has devoted his life to literature".[15]
From 2008 to 2020, he was the publisher of MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Books, and in 2021 founded Mountain Leopard Press,[16] an imprint of the Welbeck Publishing Group.[17] The Mountain Lion list was sold to Hachette in December 2022. In 2024, it was announced that MacLehose was to launch Open Borders Press, as the first imprint of Orenda Books.[18]
Early life
Christopher MacLehose was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 12 July 1940 to Alexander MacLehose and Elizabeth Hope MacLehose (née Bushell).[2] His family was involved with the book trade as printers, booksellers and publishers, and he has described them as "seven generations, all of them second sons".[3] He was educated at Shrewsbury School (1953–58),[19] and read history at Worcester College, Oxford University.[20]
Career
MacLehose took a job at the Glasgow Herald, where he hoped to stay for six months to gain the experience that would enable him to work for the recently founded Independent Television News; however, his ambitions changed direction after a few weeks: "I realised ... I wanted to work with language and words," MacLehose said in a 2012 interview.[3] So he worked in the editorial office of the family printing factory by day, while freelancing by night for The Herald writing reviews and obituaries.[3] Eventually, he was offered employment as literary editor of The Scotsman, following which he moved in 1967 to London and went into book publishing, initially as an editor at the Cresset Press (part of the Barrie Group), with P. G. Wodehouse among his authors,[3][9] as well as George MacDonald Fraser of Flashman fame, who had been the features editor of the Glasgow Herald when MacLehose was there.[21] MacLehose subsequently became editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and then editor-in-chief of William Collins.[22][23]
In March 2021, it was announced that MacLehose would be leading a new imprint at the Welbeck Publishing Group called Mountain Leopard Press, with a focus on literary work and translated literature,[16][43] the launch title being Evelio Rosero's Stranger to the Moon, translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean.[44] In December 2022 the Mountain Leopard list was sold by Welback to Hachette.[45]
In January 2024, it was announced that MacLehose would be launching Open Borders Press, the first imprint of Orenda Books, with Andrey Kurkov's Our Daily War as the imprint's first title.[45]
With "a reputation as a master at finding foreign fiction by writers such as Henning Mankell and Haruki Murakami and turning them into English language hits",[46] MacLehose has said: "When I first came into publishing, there was André Deutsch, Fredric Warburg, Ernest Hecht, Manya Harari, George Weidenfeld – a generation of multilingual people who came to England bringing the assumption that books that had to be translated were no different.... You simply published the best you could find and if you had to translate them, you just got on with it."[47]
Awards and honours
In 2006, MacLehose received the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award for International Publishing.[48][49]
