Carmen Callil

Carmen Thérèse Callil (born 15 July 1938) is an Australian publisher, writer and critic. She founded Virago Press in 1973.

Callil was born in Melbourne, Australia, but has lived in London since 1960. Her widowed mother Lorraine Clare Allen, raised four children, of whom Callil was the third. Her father, Frederick Alfred Louis Callil, was a barrister and lecturer in French at the University of Melbourne. She was educated at Star of the Sea Convent, and at Loreto Mandeville Hall. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Literature in 1960.

In the same year she left for Europe, and, after a period in Italy, settled in London in 1964. She worked for Marks & Spencer as a buying assistant, then, after placing an advertisement in the Times newspaper ("Australian, B.A. wants job in book publishing", began work at Hutchinson Publishing company in 1965.

From 1967 to 1970 she was publicity manager of the paperback imprint Panther Books, and later all imprints of Granada Publishing, and then at Anthony Blond and André Deutsch. She left to work for Ink, a countercultural Newspaper founded by Richard Neville, Andrew Fisher, Felix Dennis and Ed Victor in 1971. Ink was an offshoot of Oz and was intended to be a bridge between the underground press of the 1960s and the national newspapers of that time. Launched in May 1971, it collapsed in February 1972, following the Oz obscenity trial.

At Ink, Callil met Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, who went on to found the feminist magazine Spare Rib in June 1972. At the same time Carmen Callil founded Virago Press, to "publish books which celebrated women and women's lives, and which would, by so doing, spread the message of women's liberation to the whole population". Rowe and Boycott became directors of Virago in its first years.

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