Bridget Williams

Bridget Williams ONZM MBE
Born	1948 (age 68–69)
Residence	Wellington, New Zealand
Nationality	New Zealander
Alma mater	University of Otago
Known for	founder of independent publishing companies Port Nicholson Press and Bridget Williams Books
Relatives	Robin Williams (father)

Bridget Rosamund Williams ONZM MBE (born 1948) is a New Zealand publisher and founder of two independent publishing companies: Port Nicholson Press and Bridget Williams Books.

Born in 1948, Williams was the daughter of Mary Williams (née Thorpe) and her husband physicist and public servant Robin Williams. Williams attended Wellington Girls' College, and, in 1966, moved to Dunedin to study an arts degree in English literature at the University of Otago, where her father was appointed vice-chancellor the following year.

Williams' publishing career began when she and her husband were living in Oxford, England, while her husband, economist Geoff Bertram, studied for a PhD. Williams found work as a research assistant for Professor Helen Gardner, working on editing The New Oxford Book of English Verse, and for Professor Richard Ellmann, a biographer. These connections led on to work as an editor at Oxford University Press (OUP).

When Williams returned to New Zealand in 1976, she continued to work for OUP, collaborating with W. H. Oliver on the Oxford History of New Zealand, the first general history of New Zealand to have been published in over 20 years. In 1981 Williams left OUP to start her own independent company, Port Nicholson Press, which she founded with Roy Parsons and Lindsey Missen.

Four years later Williams sold the company to Allen & Unwin (Australia) and became managing director of Allen & Unwin (New Zealand). Two of her major projects while at Allen & Unwin went on to win the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Award: the multi-volume Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; and Claudia Orange's The Treaty of Waitangi.

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