Mary-Kay Wilmers

Mary-Kay Wilmers co-founded the London Review of Books in 1979, and has been its sole editor since 1992. After a childhood spent in America, Belgium and England, Wilmers went to Oxford to read French and Russian. Initially planning on a career as a simultaneous translator, she instead found work as a secretary at Faber & Faber in the time of T.S. Eliot, working at the Listener, the Times Literary Supplement, and contributing to the New Statesmen before co-founding the LRB. She is the author of The Eitingons, a book about her family and their cold war deeds and misdeeds, which the Daily Telegraph called “transfixingly readable.”