Liz Calder

Elisabeth Nicole Calder (née Baber; born 20 January 1938) is an English publisher and book editor.

Early life Calder was born Elisabeth Nicole Baber in London on 20 January 1938, the daughter of Florence Mary Baber (née Woodrow) and Ivor George Baber.

Career

Calder began her publishing career in 1971 at Victor Gollancz Ltd, where she published Salman Rushdie’s first novel Grimus (1975), John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978) and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve 91977). In 1986, she became a founder director of Bloomsbury Publishing, where her list included Booker winners Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje and Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer. In 1997, Calder was named Editor of the Year at the British Book Awards. She was a founder of the Groucho Club and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2010, she was a judge on the Orange Prize.

In 2009, she joined John and Genevieve Christie and Louis Baum to set up a Suffolk-based publishing house, Full Circle Editions. In October 2013, Full Circle produced FlipSide, a Brazilian literary and music festival, at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, home of Aldeburgh Music. She received the award from Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace in December 2018. In the same month she was confirmed as one of the judges for the 2019 Man Booker Prize. Also in 2018, Calder was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the RSL Benson Medal in recognition of her "meritorious works in poetry, fiction, history and belles lettres". In 2019, Calder was conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Canterbury.