Faber and Faber Limited, commonly known as Faber & Faber or simply Faber, is an independent publishing house in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro. Founded in 1929, in 2006 the company was named the KPMG Publisher of the Year. Faber and Faber Inc., formerly the American branch of the London company, was sold in 1998 to the Holtzbrinck company Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). Faber and Faber ended the partnership with FSG in 2015 and began distributing its books directly in the United States.

History

Faber and Faber began as a firm in 1929, but originated in the Scientific Press, owned by Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer. The Scientific Press derived much of its income from the weekly magazine ''The Nursing Mirror''. The Gwyers' desire to expand into trade publishing led them to Geoffrey Faber, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; they founded Faber and Gwyer in 1925. After four years, ''The Nursing Mirror'' was sold and Geoffrey Faber and the Gwyers agreed to go their separate ways. Faber selected the company name of Faber and Faber, although there was no other Faber involved. T. S. Eliot, who had been suggested to Faber by Charles Whibley, had left Lloyds Bank in London to join Faber as a literary adviser; in the first season, the firm issued his ''Poems 1909–1925''. In addition, the catalogues from the early years included books by

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

Jean Cocteau Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau ( , ; ; 5 July 1889 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th-c ...

Herbert Read Sir Herbert Edward Read, (; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read wa ...

, Max Eastman, George Rylands, John Dover Wilson, Geoffrey Keynes, Forrest Reid, Charles Williams, and Vita Sackville-West. In 1928, Faber and Faber published its first commercial success, '' Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man''. The book was at first published anonymously; the author's name, Siegfried Sassoon, was added to the title page for the second impression. Over the next six months, it was reprinted eight times.

Role in publishing

Poetry was originally the most renowned part of the Faber list, with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice joining

, Marianne Moore, Wyndham Lewis, John Gould Fletcher, Roy Campbell,

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...

, David Jones (artist-poet) and Walter de la Mare being published under T. S. Eliot's aegis.Faber, ''Faber & Faber: The Untold Story'' (2019). Under Geoffrey Faber's chairmanship, the board in 1929 included Eliot, Richard de la Mare, Charles Stewart, and Frank Vigor Morley. The firm's art director was Berthold Wolpe. Faber published biographies,

memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autob ...

s, fiction, poetry, political and religious essays, art and architecture monographs, children's books, and an ecology list. It also published Eliot's literary review, '' The Criterion''. Eliot rejected two books by

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...

, ''A Scullion's Diary'' (the original version of '' Down and Out in Paris and London'') and '' Animal Farm''. During the Second World War, paper shortages resulted in high profits, but much of this profit went to taxation. Notable postwar Faber writers include William Golding (although the company almost rejected his '' Lord of the Flies''), Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Graham, Philip Larkin, P. D. James, Tom Stoppard, and John Osborne. The firm increased its investment in contemporary drama, including plays by three Nobel Laureates:

Harold Pinter Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A List of Nobel laureates in Literature, Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramat ...

, Samuel Beckett, and T. S. Eliot. Other playwrights subsequently joined Faber, including Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Bennett, Brian Friel, Tony Harrison, David Hare, Frank McGuinness, and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Today

Modern writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey, Orhan Pamuk, and Barbara Kingsolver also joined Faber. In addition, Faber has published the translated work of prominent novelists and poets including Milan Kundera, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, Nikos Kazantzakis, Wisława Szymborska, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Czesław Miłosz. Having published the theatrical works of Samuel Beckett for several years, the company acquired the rights to the remainder of his oeuvre from the publishing house of John Calder in 2007. Faber announced in October 2011 that

Jarvis Cocker Jarvis Branson Cocker (born 19 September 1963) is an English musician. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp (band), Pulp, he became a reluctant figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s. Cocker h ...

, lead singer of the band Pulp, would be joining as editor-at-large, an appointment similar to one held by

Pete Townshend Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend (; born 19 May 1945) is an English musician. He is the co-founder, guitarist, keyboardist, second lead vocalist, principal songwriter and leader of the Who, one of the most influential rock bands of the 1960s an ...

of The Who in the 1980s. In 2008, the imprint Faber Finds was set up to make copyrighted out-of-print books reavailable, using print-on-demand technology. Works republished in the imprint have included items from the Mass-Observation archives, and works by John Betjeman, Angus Wilson, A. J. P. Taylor,

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, hist ...

, Joyce Cary, Nina Bawden, Jean Genet, P. H. Newby, Louis MacNeice, John Carey, F. R. Leavis, Jacob Bronowski, Jan Morris, and Brian Aldiss. In 2009, Faber Finds began to release

e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Al ...

s. Faber's American arm was sold in 1998 to Farrar, Straus and Giroux ("FSG"), where it remained as an imprint focused on arts, entertainment, media, and popular culture. In February 2015, Faber announced the end of its partnership with FSG. In June 2012, to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, Faber launched a website �
Sixty Years in Sixty Poems
Commissioned fo
The Space
– the new digital arts platform developed by the Arts Council in partnership with the BBC – Sixty Years in Sixty Poems took the poems from Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's anthology
Jubilee Lines
and interpreted them using actors' recordings, sound-based generative design, and archive film footage.

Faber Academy

In 2008, Faber launched Faber Academy, a creative writing business offering courses for aspiring writers. Courses include "Writing a Novel", "Advanced Poetry", and "Getting Started: Beginners' Fiction". At times, courses are tutored by famous writers, such as Mike Figgis, Jeanette Winterson, and Tobias Hill. Notable students have included S. J. Watson and Georgian/British singer-songwriter Katie Melua. In 2018, The Faber Academy started offering a scholarship to two writers every year, with a focus on under-represented groups such as writers of colour, disabled writers and

LGBTQ LGBTQ people are individuals who are lesbian, Gay men, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (sexuality and gender), questioning. Many variants of the initialism are used; LGBTQIA+ people incorporates intersex, Asexuality, asexual, ...

+ writers.

Faber Digital

Faber Digital was launched in 2009. It has published a number of book-related apps for the iPhone and the iPad, including Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone (which was nominated for a BAFTA award), QI: Quite Interesting, Harry Hill's Joke Book, and The Waste Land for iPad app. The Waste Land for iPad app was Faber's second collaboration with Touch Press, following the Solar System for iPad, which won the Futurebook Award for Digital innovation at the Book Industry Awards in 2011. In 2013, in partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing plc, Faber Digital launched Drama Online, a subscription-based digital content platform for libraries, educators, students, and researchers.

Faber Factory

Faber introduce
Faber Factory
in 2011, an eBook conversion and digitisation service. Faber Factory won the Services to Independent Publishers Award at the IPG Awards in 2013 and 2015.

Location

The firm's original location was its Georgian offices at 24 Russell Square, in Bloomsbury, London. Faber later moved to 3 Queen Square, London, and on 19 January 2009 the firm moved to Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London. The company relocated to The Bindery, Hatton Garden, London in 2023.

Nobel Laureate authors published by Faber

* 1948: T. S. Eliot * 1960: Saint-John Perse * 1969: Samuel Beckett * 1980: Czesław Miłosz * 1983: William Golding * 1992: Derek Walcott * 1995: Seamus Heaney * 1996: Wisława Szymborska * 1999: Günter Grass * 2005:

* 2006: Orhan Pamuk * 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa * 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro

References

External links

*
Faber Academy: Creative Writing with Faber and Faber

Entry about Faber&Faber in METROMOD archive
by Burcu Dogramaci {{DEFAULTSORT:Faber And Faber 1929 establishments in England Book publishing companies based in London British companies established in 1929 Literary publishing companies Poetry publishers Privately held companies of the United Kingdom Publishing companies established in 1929