Canongate Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Canongate Books published Life of Pi in 2002, making it the first Scottish-published book to win the Booker Prize. The firm is based in Edinburgh, in the old city quarter whose name it carries. By 2002, Canongate had been running for nearly three decades. That prize arrived at a house with an unusual backstory. A decade earlier, the firm had been insolvent. A young buyer rescued it from a receiver using family funds and rebuilt it with entirely different ambitions. Who made that transformation happen? What kinds of books did the new Canongate believe in? The firm that emerged from that rescue was later named the British Book Awards Publisher of the Year in both 2003 and 2009.

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• 2. Scottish Roots

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  Stephanie Wolfe Murray and her husband Angus Wolfe Murray founded Canongate in 1973. Their model was a speciality press: small print runs, books aimed at Scottish readers, subjects that larger publishers rarely touched. The most prominent author on the early list was Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark appeared under the Canongate imprint in 1981. Charles Palliser's The Quincunx followed in 1989. For more than twenty years, Scottish-interest books with small print runs defined Canongate's identity.

  Alasdair Gray would return to Canongate with A Life in Pictures in 2010. The speciality press the Wolfe Murrays had built was on the verge of a fundamental change.

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• 3. The Byng Era

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  Jamie Byng led the management buyout of Canongate in 1994. Funds came from two members of his own family: his stepfather Christopher Bland and his father-in-law Charlie McVeigh. Byng became the firm's chief executive and has held that role ever since. One of his first moves was to expand the list well beyond Scottish interests. One new imprint, Pocket Canons, published individual books of the Bible as standalone editions. Payback Press and Rebel Inc. followed. General works replaced the Scottish speciality focus as the firm's defining ambition.

  Grove/Atlantic, Inc. took on the Canongate name in the United States under a joint venture arrangement. The publisher Walker collaborated with Canongate on young adult titles. In March 2010, Canongate and the music label Dirtee Stank announced a joint venture to publish Dizzee Rascal's memoir. That agreement fell through; the firm published The Dizzee Rascal Story the same year. Text Publishing in Australia was a sister company for a time, until Canongate sold its majority stake in 2011. By 2009, through the Independent Alliance, Canongate was part of a coalition that ranked as the United Kingdom's fifth-largest publisher grouping.

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• 4. Beyond the Expected

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  The Audacity of Hope came to Canongate after a series of emails between Jamie Byng and then-Senator Barack Obama and his team. The firm published it in 2007, alongside a Canongate edition of Obama's earlier memoir Dreams from My Father. Change We Can Believe In followed under the Canongate imprint in 2009.

  Julian Assange's relationship with Canongate was far more contentious. In 2011, the firm published Julian Assange - the Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange himself had not consented to the publication. Canongate and Assange gave differing accounts of how that situation arose.

  Nick Cave published his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, with Canongate in September 2009. The firm released it in four formats: hardback, audiobook, ebook, and iPhone application. David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives came out that same year and gained attention through a tweet from Stephen Fry. The book later became the subject of a live show by Brian Eno.

  Canongate worked with Enhanced Editions on digital versions of selected titles for iPhone and iPod Touch. Three of the four books in that program were the Obama memoirs and Cave's Death of Bunny Munro. The fourth belongs to a separate literary series Canongate ran across the same decade.

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• 5. The Myth Series

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  Karen Armstrong contributed the first entry to the Canongate Myth Series in 2005 with A Short History of Myth. The project brought together contemporary authors to retell ancient myths from cultures around the world. Margaret Atwood followed with The Penelopiad, also in 2005. Jeanette Winterson contributed Weight that same year.

  David Grossman, Alexander McCall Smith, and Victor Pelevin each added volumes in 2006. Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy, Su Tong's Binu and the Great Wall, and Salley Vickers's Where Three Roads Meet appeared in 2007. Dubravka Ugrešić and Klas Östergren contributed entries in 2009. Two more came in 2010: Milton Hatoum's The Orphans of Eldorado and Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

  Spanning five years from 2005 to 2010, the Myth Series produced fourteen volumes. Several of the individual Canongate titles published alongside it were winning major prizes in the same period.

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• 6. Prizes and Legacy

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  Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2007. Nam Le's The Boat won the Dylan Thomas Prize the following year. In 2009, Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. That same year, The Boat also won the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

  Kevin Barry's Beatlebone won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015. Mike McCormack's Solar Bones won the same prize in 2016. Amy Liptrot's The Outrun won the Wainwright Prize in 2016.

  In June 2010, plans were announced to establish a living archive of Canongate Books at the University of Dundee. The collection was developed in partnership with the university's Archive Services. The archive at Dundee will eventually make accessible the firm's internal record. Researchers will be able to trace which books Canongate accepted, and which it declined.

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