Carmen Kallil
2022/10/17
Carmen Carliel, the pioneer champion of women writers, has died at the age of 84
Carmen Callil, a publisher and writer who supported women writers and transformed the classics of British literature, died of leukaemia in London on Monday at the age of 84. The news was confirmed by her agent.
Callil started as a campaign outsider, founded, where she published contemporary bestsellers including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelo, and Angela Carter. She challenged the male-dominated canon of English literature, reprinting and publishing modern classics by writers including Antonia White, Willa Cather, and Rebecca West, eventually becoming a pillar of the literary world. She was made a noblewoman in 2017, serves on a committee and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Born in Melbourne in 1938, Caryl had a difficult childhood that she later called "purgatory". She and Germaine Greer attend the same convent school – an atmosphere she describes as "rules, censorship, silence, and most importantly a feeling of disapproval that awaits you to suddenly feel most complete in those rare moments". After studying at the University of Melbourne, she left Australia the week she graduated, arriving in London in 1960 and finding it a "very closed and quiet place".
Callil's early life in London was challenging and she attempted suicide. After embarking on her path to rehabilitation with a therapist, in 1964 she placed an ad in The Times: "Australian Bachelor of Arts, typing, want to pursue a career in publishing." ”
"I got three invitations and accepted one," she told the Australian Book Review, "which was a slave to the book editors sponsored by the Hutchinsons." ”
From there, she worked in book publicity — one of the few jobs at the time open to women who didn't want to be secretaries — and then worked at Ink, an offshoot of Oz magazine. When it collapsed in 1972, she became a freelancer, dedicating herself that summer to launching the feminist magazine Spare Rib. While sitting in a bar, she came up with the idea of starting a feminist publishing company, "like turning on a light bulb."
Virago Press is named after the female warrior in Latin and was founded in 1973. Two years later, the first title appeared: Margaret Chamberlain's portrait of the life of a woman in an East Anglian village, Fenwomen. Callil told the Guardian that the imprint was for". ”
In 2006, Callil became a writer, investigating families and Vichy France, Bad Faith. Through the tragic death of Anne Darquier, a therapist who helped Khalil when she first arrived in London, she explores the life of Daquil's father, Louis, a collaborator of the Nazis who sent thousands of French Jews to their deaths. The Observer described it as "anger, her contempt for the man and her anger at the persecution system and bureaucratic murders he served", but also revealed "a vulnerability that few among her colleagues would suspect". Calile followed suit in 2020, studying her own family history, Oh Happy Day, painting how her ancestors were transported to Australia after poverty drove them to commit petty crimes and drawing parallels to modern inequality.
Calile never lost her passion, withdrawing from the Booker International panel after her judges awarded the award to Philip Ross and protested with Extinction Rebellion. But she was also very polite. Writing in The Guardian, Callil recalled an appearance at the Suffolk Book Union where "a group of women" stepped forward to thank her Virago.
"What they really thank are the writers and their novels," she writes, "women write in thankless times." All it takes is to know that they are there, love them, and publish them. ”
Whether Virago has changed
Attitudes towards women in publishing?
It's been 40 years since Virago Books was founded to celebrate the work of women writers. So how successful has it been in blazing a trail for more women writers?
In 1973, Carmen Carlier founded a publishing company with the main goal of putting women's writing at its core. Callil, who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and then spent her 20s in London, told me that this generation thinks the world is their oyster, and her border retriever snores softly at our feet as we sit in her colorful living room. She worked in underground media, provided publicity for Ink magazine (company motto: "Anything outrageous is properly promoted"), and became friends with Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, who founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1972. The title led Calli to the idea of doing the same with books. A new publishing company started at her kitchen table, she says, and when she and boycotted, "sat on the floor of my apartment and flipped through a book of goddesses." Rosie met Villago: "A belligerent woman", I said: "It's okay! I love it. '”
Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer helped found the company and quickly became a success—in 1978, it launched an influential collection of modern classics that celebrated and revived the work of hundreds of women writers with its distinctive green spine. It's still thriving today, led by Lennie Goodings as a mark of Little, Brown, and celebrated the upcoming Feminist Fifty Shades last weekend, an anthology featuring essays by authors like Tahmima Anam, Xinran, Ahdaf Soueif, and Bibishi.
Virago wasn't the only feminist publishing house of that era. It was part of a movement that began in the early 1960s and flourished over the next 20 years. Different publishers have different ambitions, but all firmly believe that women's work should be valued as much as men's and, therefore, should have the same opportunity to continue printing and become part of the classic. There is a strong interest in promoting the work of women who might otherwise be overlooked; Those marginalized by race, class, sexual orientation and disability, and gender. In the UK, Onlywomen Press specialises in lesbian writing, while Sheba showcases black, working-class, and lesbian writers.
The impetus to publish feminist nonfiction is also evident, whether polemical or memoiral, which explores and defines the female experience. Philip Brewster, now a literary agent for Capel & Land, came up with the idea of establishing a feminist stamp, the Pandora Press, and one of her first books was written by women from Greenham Common. "It seemed to achieve what we really wanted to do," she said. "We are all part of the women's movement. We represent it, but we also inform it. By 1988, there were 11 feminist publishing houses in the UK.
Many of them are now either downsizing or shutting down, but the publishing environment looks very different from when they first started. As Callil points out, although there have always been many women in publishing, it is only recently that they tend to lead companies and exercise important power. The question is whether the movement has succeeded beyond that. Over the past 40 years, have women writers been valued as much as their male writers and enjoyed equal opportunities for longevity?
There have been some recent signs of its success in the royal family, especially from a glimpse of the English Literature Prize. This year alone, Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, with women winning in all five categories of the Costa Prize, with Hilary Mantel being the overall winner – after she won the Booker Prize for the second time late last year. Twenty years ago, all-female shortlists for literary prizes were almost unheard of. In fact, it was the 1991 all-male Booker shortlist that created a lively dialogue between publishers and writers and led to the formation of the 1996 Orange Prize.
The award, now known as the Women's Fiction Prize (Orange's sponsorship has ended), yesterday announced a strong shortlist for 2013 that includes Zadie Smith, Elif Shafak, Barbara Kingsolver, Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson and, inevitably, Mantel. Kate Moss, co-founder of the award, said she thinks the current era is a good time for women writers. She said it was important to continue to win awards, to preserve the territory it had already won, but "in this country, I think the current issue has to do with the publication of other voices." So we're seeing library services being crafted far away, completely unaware of what this means for communities that don't have immediate access to books... Those who, no matter who they are, may find room to read, to discover the ability to write. I think these are the bigger questions at the moment than whether you're a man or a woman. ”
There is certainly strong evidence that the publishing industry is still dominated by a privileged few. Last year, for example, American writer Roxane Gay highlighted the reading problem of black writers by analyzing books reviewed by The New York Times during 2011. Of the 742 books, 655 (nearly 90%) were written by white authors. "This doesn't even fully reflect the racial makeup [of the United States], where 72 percent of the population is white according to the 2010 census," she noted. ”
Gay's survey follows the work of the Vida: Women in Literary Arts group, which has published annual statistics on the representation of women in literary journals for three years. Its latest statistics were released last week — and it analyzes literary publications with more reviews by female authors than male authors. The Boston Review is very close to equality, with 52% male authors and 48% female, but in most other cases, the gap is huge. In Harper's Magazine, 83% of book reviews are male and 17% are female; In London Book Reviews, 73% are men and 27% are women; In the New York Review of Books, men make up 78% and women 22%; In TLS, men make up 75% and women 25%.
Some argue that this difference may be due to the fact that women publish fewer serious fiction and non-fiction works than men. Figures on authorship are difficult to pin down because publishing encompasses a variety of genres and styles, commercial, and literary. But writer Ruth Franklin found far less representation of women writers in a mini-survey conducted in the U.S., which surveyed 13 publishers — focusing on books that might be censored. Only Penguin Imprint Riverhead is close to parity, with 55% of its books being male and 45% female. For Verso and Dalkey Archive Press, only 11 percent and 10 percent of their books are written by women, respectively.
This deficiency seems relatively puzzling when you consider women's interest in literature. When Debbie Taylor started Mslexia, a women's writing magazine, in the late '90s, she found data showing that women were far more likely than men to take reading as important, and were more likely to buy and read twice as much as men. There are more books than men every year.
There's no reason to suspect that the numbers have changed much, but men's disinterest in women's writing may provide a clue to women's low representation on literary bookshelves and review pages. In 2005-6, British academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins asked men and women about books they considered influential; The top 20 for women includes 6 male authors. The top 20 for men included a female author, Harper Lee, which led Jardine and Watkins to comment: "We suspect that some men don't realize that Harper is female, is it rude?" They also asked men and women about the last novel they had read; Four out of five men say it is the work of a male author, while women are almost as likely to read a book by a male author as a female author. If women are interested in both male and female literary fiction, and men are only interested in men's literary fiction, it is not surprising that more male authors may be censored and published.
Taylor suspects that women still find the literary world undesirable, if not entirely hostile—and that's not surprising, given the low representation of women. The fewer women whose work is published and celebrated, the less likely they feel their work is valued. She spoke to publishers and agents who said they received far fewer female submissions. One of Mslexia's goals is to provide a place where women can submit their work with confidence. One of their most recent fiction competitions had 2,000 entries, and of the 100 shortlisted — all completed, Taylor says — 39 were never submitted anywhere else.
There is a way for women writers to be taken more seriously. Taylor noted that of the last 10 books to win the Booker Prize, 8 had male protagonists, 1 book was female, and 1 was a male and female protagonist. If a woman adopts a male perspective, their story seems more likely to be respected and perceived as universal. Author Naomi Alderman is well aware of this bias and notes that women who won the Booker Prize include: "Hilary Mantel wrote about a strong man [Thomas Cromwell]. Pat Barker writes about World War I and men's experiences. AS Byatt, yes, has a woman in it, but actually a lot of Possession is written in the first person as a man. Let's look at their names: Hilary, Pat, and AS. These are the names that a man can read on a train, and you won't necessarily know right away that they're reading a woman's [a book]. ”
Poet and co-founder of Vida, Erin Belieu, says that among her writer friends, "it's surprising that women feel anxious about their subjects. The most anxious – worst – is whether you mention children. She said there are fears that this could be professional suicide.
Taylor writes that the masculine aesthetic, developed over the centuries, continues to define literary excellence. "Historically, men have been responsible for publishing and reviewing," she says, "so that gets into people's minds." If it's good, it has to be emotionally distanced, technically complex, and factual information. But more importantly, the male gaze, the male point of view. ”
The problem is that even if female authors adopt a male perspective and strictly male aesthetic themes, they are likely to be packaged into bubbles and their content ruined by the cover. Alderman writes about this in her essay Fifty Shades of Feminism. "I didn't decide to call myself NA Alderman in the first place," she wrote, "and I had to have a women's jacket with a woman gazing thoughtfully at the summer meadow." Even though the novel is primarily concerned with the relationship between two gay men. ”
This is illustrated by the recent uproar over the cover of the new edition of The Bell Jar, which illustrates Sylvia Plath's fictional research into depression, in which a woman is putting on makeup. In her essay, Alderman forcefully writes about how, in some ways, she is more likely to operate in the world of video games, where she is also a writer, and where women have such a low status that they are seen as honorary figures once they are on the right track. In publishing, she writes, women have gained a certain amount of power, and they are now in the "pen of a special girl," easily marginalized as a group while waiting for full equality.
Of course, this doesn't just apply to women writers. The digital age has brought new problems, especially for young women. One of the areas that women's publishing houses particularly support, feminist nonfiction, is booming, seemingly tapping directly into this uncertainty. Some of the fierce, serious polemics of the 70s are gone, replaced by books aimed at young women, which are often funny and feature self-help. These include Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman, Lena Dunham's upcoming book (apparently roughly based on Helen Gurley Brown's '80s self-help book Owning Everything) and Sheila Heti's How should one be? – A novel with non-fiction overtones that explores whether women can be geniuses and has just been shortlisted for the Women's Award.
Square Peg's imprint will be published by young authors Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter, who run the feminist website The Vagenda. There has also been a new wave of feminist work around the world. Brewster, who runs a list at publisher IB Tauris, said she was excited about emerging works in the Middle East, India and Africa that blended ideas from feminist activism and academia.
The influence of the feminist publishing movement can be seen. This is reflected in the immense power of women in today's publishing world, and in the continued insistence that women's voices should be taken seriously, and if literature matters – if it both shapes and reflects our lives – it should represent something outside a narrow corner of the world. It exists in every story centered on women's lives, in mediums far beyond the world of books. For example, Callil says she fell madly in love with the Danish TV show Borgen, which centers on a female prime minister. "Borgen is a Virago modern classic of the 500s," she says. "It's human life, and it's wonderful."
Brave Fighter→ Carlil and her publishing kingdom
Carmen Callil, who co-founded Virago 34 years ago, has always loved to fight. The response to her latest book, about Vichy France, forced her into the ring again
Carmen Callil's book about Vichy France, Bad Faith, brought all the unexpected, perhaps the most surprising, a series of boycotts. Callil is boycotting French beauty giant L'Oreal because it hired collaborators during the Nazi occupation; She herself was boycotted by Jewish groups in the United States because of a line in the book critical of Israel. Earlier this year, when she received an invitation to participate in an orange award with the words "Champagne at Tattinger," Carlier had already left. "I said, well, I'm not going! Pierre Tattinger is a monster. As long as I live, I will discourage people from drinking it. ”
Callil's 34th anniversary of founding Virago, a feminist publishing house, has a reputation that still comes from that era more than a decade after her relationship with the publishing house ended: outspoken, aggressive – sharp in the pejorative terms of the time – and inseparable from her Australian background. "I really like being Australian rather than British," she jokes, "because I feel sorry for being British." She arrived by boat from Melbourne in 1960 at the age of 22, frustrated by her romance with a married man and encountered a culture completely foreign to her. I think England is a very closed and silent place. Things have improved since the 60s, but things that come naturally to me have always been considered rude and rude. You can never lose your temper, you can never say ',' you're never allowed to say that you're completely hopeless about what you've done, you're never allowed to say anything. I came to the conclusion that I should not have come here. I should have stayed home. Truly. Or live in France. ”
Callyl expresses this lightly, like the evil of a person who likes to throw grand statements and dare to make you disagree. She is usually amused by what she sees. "If you're lucky enough, you're basically going to choose the life you want," she said, and that's the way it is. She lives with her dog in a house in west London. One therapist named Anne Darquier, who saved her in London in her early years, met her for seven years until the day she knocked on her door but got no response. Darkil died in the apartment and committed suicide. A year later, Callil recognized her full name, Darquier de Pellepoix, in a television documentary, and revealed that her father had been a leading figure in anti-Semitism in France during World War II. Louis Darquier was a notorious collaborator who became Commissioner for Jewish Affairs and oversaw the first shipments from France to Auschwitz. The book that will become "unbelief" is born.
Through the tragic story of Anne Darquier and the lives of her rotten parents, Callil personalizes great pieces of European history. Faced with a labyrinth of French bureaucracy, the book is astonishingly diligent, taking four years to study and another four years to write. It is shocking how the Nazis used the French state apparatus to manage their crimes. In one scene, French police on the western outskirts of Paris carry French children onto a train bound for a concentration camp. Could it happen in the UK? "I think we have to think that it can, you know, because I don't think humans are too different, one from the other. We are luckier. ”
However, when the book was published in the United States, all attention was focused on a line on the last page, in which Callyl points out that the lessons of history are often forgotten. She referred to atrocities in Rwanda, Australia, Ireland, Chile, East Timor, Guantánamo Bay and Israel. A pro-Israel lobby took immediate action, and under pressure, the French embassy canceled a launch in New York. Questions such as "What were the Australian-Lebanese writing about Jews in the first place?" " and so on. Overwhelmed Calli's inbox. Given that she has just spent eight years shedding light on an underestimated aspect of the Holocaust, the folly of this response is striking. But, for the sake of a quiet life, doesn't she regret including that line?
"Nope! I wish I had said more. I don't understand why Jews shouldn't be monsters. Jews can be monsters; They are not holy people. And I think Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians is horrible, I don't know "care what you say." To be honest, I'm talking about what I mean in the book. In the face of anger, this episode did not make her more timid. I have a terrible question about Muslims and the veil," she said later, and she was gone.
Caryl, 68, is battle-hardened. Before she left, things in Villago became very lively. Recently, when she started rummaging through boxes in the attic, she remembered this. Her Virago archive contains a box with three black crosses that store the most abusive correspondence between Callil and her "sisters" — her four co-directors at the time, Ursula Owen, Harriet Spicer, Alexandra Pringle and Lennicotings. "I find some sisters hard to accept," she said.
Virago was founded in 1973 as an alternative to all male-dominated publishing houses and their long list of war books. "If I don't, I think someone else will," she said. "It's just sitting there waiting for my generation to say, 'I'm sorry.'" It revives classics by the likes of Vera Brittain, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, and Stevie Smith and becomes a trusted brand that can buy a book with the power of the green spine alone. It said "this is a world," Callil said, and for a while it was very successful.
But things are not good in Villago's office. "They always disapprove of me because I'm not a very good feminist," she said briskly. "My feminism is not theoretical. Of course not. And I never bother with things like [about] makeup, bras or 'chairs'. I just thought, go ahead. My feminism is very strong, but it's also important that he's more focused on rude men telling you what to do than bits and pieces. ”
Caryl loves to fight, especially with herself. She is accepting her true nature. "I've always been scared, really. I was scared until I grew up. I was scared when I started writing Virago, scared when I started my book. I was scared when I had to speak in public. I guess I'm just a little used to being scared, so I ignored it. ”
The publishing industry is different now, with veterans complaining that it has been Murdochized in favor of trash celebrity memoirs. Carlier calls it snobbery. "A book about footballers and a book for Jordan for $700 million? To say this, you have to despise those who have read these books, I don't think I have never. I've always had rather vulgar taste. If it's boring it won't -- "Barbara Cattelan is terrible. But they give a lot of money to those who entertain and those whom the public wants to read. They are also offering something else. ”
Carlier was well educated in a monastery in Australia – intellectually good, but emotionally abused. She was bullied by nuns, cold creatures, but surprisingly, she didn't resist. The exacting demands of Catholicism would eventually manifest itself in Carlile's ambition: if she were to become a Catholic, she would become an Orthodox Catholic.
When she was nine years old, her father, a lawyer, died of cancer. "He has this huge library," she said. "I finished reading. I adore Dickens. I love George Meredith, George Borough, Thomas Hardy, Shaw. A lot of Shaw and Wells. Arabian Desert. A book about Gilbert and Sullivan. I liked everything related to them. I like Georgit Heyer. Willa Cather. Corriere della Sera and Reader's Digest, we all got it. Tugboat Annie。 Who else? Boswell. ”
Her mother was not the "great coppersmith" Callil described. "She's not very good at it. I don't think she should have children. She was really a child herself. Very important. But she didn't have a theory of life like those nuns; She doesn't say that God wants you to be extremely unhappy and go to hell. ”
Her mother couldn't quite figure out what she produced at Callil. She despairs of her daughter's relationship with a married man, and Callil never reveals his identity other than his initials. Unbelief is dedicated to him, PBH. Did he know how unhappy he made her? "Yes. When he did, he made up for it. He's a good guy. Lovely people. The usual human defects. ”
She did not make a conscious decision not to marry. Work is more important. "I'd always rather write 'Treachery' than get married, do you agree?" She sniffed. "I don't mind getting married, I think it's lovely to have someone to take care of you. However, all my married friends say they won't take care of you anyway. ”
Next, she wanted to write a book about the cleansing of French beauty companies of all Nazi sympathizers; Truly pursue L'Oréal. "Nobody gets them, nobody fixes them down." It's a onerous boycott, as L'Oréal owns many other companies – Body Shop, Lancôme, and more. . Caryl had a list in her purse. "I'm basically just Yves St Laurent and Guy Laroche."
She wondered why Anne Darquier didn't ask her for help. But it would be disruptive to the therapist/client relationship. As a child, Darquier romanticized her absent parents, who she was raised by nannies in England, imagining them as heroes of the resistance. The truth, when she finds out, must be terrible. "She used the word 'hate' to the very few people she talked about her father. One or two friends. Hate is the word. ”
This is a book about disillusionment, the personal and the culture. Callil was romantic about Australia when he first arrived in the UK. "Now I realize what a mistake I made. I made a very big mistake and I kind of fantasize about it. Because there are scumbags everywhere. That's how the situation sums up. ”
Revelation:
Lilette Pony (Callil's cousin)
Battle of Algiers
Children of heaven
Charles Dickens
PBH
Obituary of Madame Carmen Carlier
Founded Virago, a publisher that supports women's writing and books on feminist topics
Carmen Callil, who died at the age of 84, came up with the idea of starting the feminist publishing company Virago, "like turning on a light bulb." Ever since she discovered the news at a cocktail party in 1972 when the feminist magazine Spare Rib was founded, her first inclination was to name it Spare Rib Books. Then she and journalist Rosie Boycott stumbled upon the word virago in a book about the goddess – a valian, warlike woman. The resulting venture radically expanded the scope of women's writing and changed the role of women in publishing itself.
Virago's goal was to provide a mass-market publisher to 52% of the population (women), who at the time had neither a mortgage nor a bank loan. Marsha Rowe, co-founder of Spare Rib, explained to the magazine's publicist, Callil, the idea of a "very serious American feminist" in the '60s, which she herself learned under her mother's knees. "I never had time to listen to the bra-burning crap of the Daily Mail because it doesn't include men... The number of men who have helped me make Virago stand out is countless. ”
An advisory group of 28 women (friends, journalists, academics) provided money and food as well as advice. As the news spread, women poured up the stairs to the Callil loft in Chelsea, southwest London, offering ideas and manuscripts – "I'm tired of hearing about vaginas." Most people ask, "Can I help?" Many did, including Anna Coote, who brought in Marie Chamberlain, first author of Villago, whose Women: Portraits of Women in the English Village was published in 1973 in conjunction with the quartet.
The following year, Virago became self-funded and independent, with a capital of £1,500 and a guaranteed overdraft of £25,000 and a loan of £10,000. Rowe and Boycott left, while Ursula Owen, a psychiatric social worker and one of many early volunteers, became editorial director. Harriet Spicer, who used to work as a publicist at Calli, came on board to take charge of production.
Callil tried to balance Virago's needs with the needs of her advocacy company to meet the bills. The author helped: Angela Carter wrote The Sadeian Woman for just £25. Vera Brittain's will of youth was first published in 1933, republished in 1978, and became a five-episode television series for the BBC the following year.
Each dark green book reads the manifesto "Virago is a feminist publishing company" on its second page, followed by a quote from Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance and Revolution: "It is only when women begin to organize en masse that we become a political force and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society." ”
At the suggestion of author Michael Holroyd, Callil read Antonia White's Frost in May and decided to publish it, inventing a series of Virago Modern Classics (VMC) in 1978 to challenge Penguin's male-dominated series at the time. "If founding Virago was my first light bulb moment, dreaming of classics was my second," Callil recalled years later, adding that the collection is now as respected and recognized as any work in the publishing world.
Almost overnight, a brand was born from scratch. Never mind, Anthony Burgess, who welcomed VMC's revival of Dorothy Richardson's four-volume pilgrimage, regretted that it was reissued by "chauvinistic sows" — teachers, WI members, radical feminists, and even men welcomed Virago, and Callil started doing it because she wanted to prove that "women have their own history."
In 1982, Callil was headhunters to take over Chatto & Windus. She accepted Virago's offer to go with her, believing that to survive, it had to be part of a larger group – Chatto, Cape and Bodley Head at the time. The decision caused resentment but was a success, with Callil taking care of VMC while spending £625,000 on Holroyd's George Bernard Shaw biography.
But Virago lost profitability as part of a larger group ("male-run companies," Callil says), which was owned by Random House in 1987. Callil, Owen, Spicer, Lennie Goodings, and Alexandra Pringle bought the company, but by 1995, the book trade was threatened on all fronts, and it was clear that Virago could no longer stand alone. Callil stepped down as chairman, Little, Brown was saved, and it continued to thrive, although the company in turn became part of the multinational Hachette Group.
Callil may have committed appalling acts, claiming that she is struggling with odds. The people she worked with remember crying in the toilet many times. "I cried in the toilet too – we all cried," Callil said in four BBC documentaries, Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time (2016). "I would ask people: What the fuck are you doing?" But she claims colleagues are free to tell her to fuck off in return.
She loves animals; Requests for leave to mourn for pets would be understandable, and while on vacation in France a few days before her pet passport, she had admitted to calling her dog for an hour. She is always loyal to her close friends.
Carmen was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the third of four children. Her mother, Nee Allen, whose family fled Cork in the late 1800s, fled post-massacre Lebanon by Maronite Christians, while the family of her father, Frederick Kallil, travelled from Lebanon. A barrister, assistant lecturer in French at the University of Melbourne and opera lover, he named his daughter after Bizet's lively heroine. She delves into her family origins in Oh, Happy Day (2020).
Carmen was only eight years old when her father died: during his long illness, she was sent to a monastery boarding school. She was "miserable and lonely", and the nuns drew all the joy from life and instilled in the young mind the fear of sin and hell. Even in adult life, Khalil felt that if she disagreed with him, "God would follow me with a scythe." She saw no interest in intellectual achievement, no interest in the educational focus of being a woman. "I can't think of a worse way to spend your life than this – horrible waste." Years later, when she read about Frost in May, she immediately referred to the story of a nine-year-old child locked up in a monastery.
At the University of Melbourne, she studied English literature and Australian history. First learned of the cruel treatment suffered by the early settlers, she cried and became a forever "political animal". Almost as soon as she graduated, she left for Europe and "had a wonderful time in Italy". In 1960, she arrived in England.
As the title of Villago's memoirs of Sarah Maitland, published in 1988, put it, the ensuing decade of London was "very heavenly". Work was easy to find, and Callyl soon worked in the publishing industry, part of a group of young female publicists.
For Callil and many of her generation, 1968 was a political turning point. Then came the underground media, the International Times and the Wizard of Oz, whose publishers, Richard Neville and Felix Dennis, launched the newspaper Ink as a bridge to the national media. Callil volunteered to deal with propaganda – "it's the best thing". Neville and Dennis were distracted by the 1971 Oz obscene trial and imprisoned until their appeal was successful. When Ink went out of business, Rowe, Boycott and Callil started Spare Rib, which founded her book promotion company and Virago Press.
After retiring from publishing, Callil wrote reviews and feature stories for newspapers and magazines, and split her time between London and France. She occasionally appeared on television and radio, judged awards (resigned from the Manbuk International Jury in 2011 for the decision to award the prize to Philip Ross), gave a number of lectures, and published a book of her own in 2006. Bad Letters is a critically acclaimed biography of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, until then only a footnote in French World War II history.
She brushed shoulders with lung cancer and focused on organizing archives for the British Library. After the 2016 EU referendum, she founded 48% & Rising, campaigned for Remain, and supported the Writers Rebel group that supported Extinction Rebellion and British Palestinian artists.
There are various accolades, including the International Women's Writing Association's Outstanding Writing Award, as well as honorary doctorates from Sheffield, York, Oxford Brookes and the Open University. In a 2017 birthday honor, Callil was named a noblewoman of the literary service.
"I've always wanted to change the world," Callil once said. "It's not good enough."
Her brother Julian survived. Another brother and an older sister died before her.
Finish.
Original English source: The Guardian.
Translation and summary editor: Man Qiao.
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