Tom Maschler

Thomas Michael Maschler (16 August 193315 October 2020) was a British publisher and writer. From 1960, he was influential as the head of publishing company Jonathan Cape over a period of more than three decades. Maschler was noted for instituting the Booker Prize for British, Irish and Commonwealth literature in 1969. He was involved in publishing the works of many notable authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, John Lennon, Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin and Salman Rushdie.

Early life Maschler was born in Berlin, Germany, to Austrian Jewish parents, Rita (Masseron) and Kurt Leo Maschler on 16 August 1933. His father was a publisher. Maschler was five years old when his family fled to the UK from Vienna after the Nazi annexation (Anschluss) of Austria. Maschler published two books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), based on John Lennon's doodles. P. H. Newby was the first winner of the prize for Something to Answer For, in 1969. The prize was sponsored by the Booker–McConnell group from 1969 to 2001, the Man Group from 2002 to 2019, and subsequently by the charitable foundation Crankstart.

In 1991, he stepped down from his position as the chairman of Jonathan Cape, when the company was sold to Si Newhouse's Random House Publishing. The company had been losing money for a few years prior, necessitating the deal. He was diagnosed with manic depression shortly after the deal went through.

Criticism Maschler was sometimes criticised for his forceful approach to publishing, with a charge that while he was good at identifying commercial best sellers, he had "little interest in books for their own sake". He was considered a galvanising force and criticised for being inhospitable to some of his authors. It would be 14 years until Pym had another novel published. The novelist never fully forgave Maschler. When she was rediscovered in 1977, she refused to let Cape publish her new novels. Pym and her sister Hilary invented a weak-tasting dessert, a combination of lime jelly and milk, and called it "Maschler pudding". After Pym's death, Maschler appeared in the 1992 television film Miss Pym's Day Out recounting his decision to reject the novel (which was posthumously published in 1982).

Personal life and death In 1970, Maschler married his first wife Fay Coventry, who went on to be a restaurant critic for the Evening Standard, and they had three children. The couple divorced in 1987, and he married his second wife, Regina Kulinicz, in 1988.

In the 2024 play Giant, Maschler's relationship with the author Roald Dahl, who Maschler acted as the agent for, he is played by Elliot Levey.