Sonny Mehta

Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta (born 1942) is the current editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Born in 1942, Sonny Mehta is the son of Amrik Singh Mehta among the first of independent India's diplomats. As a child Mehta lived all over the world including Prague, New York, Nepal and Geneva. Sonny Mehta was educated at Sanawar School, India, and Sevenoaks School, UK, where he won an open scholarship to Cambridge University, acquiring two degrees, in History and English Literature, while also editing the magazine Granta.

Mehta began his publishing career in 1965 in London at Rupert Hart-Davis, then joined Granada Publishing in 1966 to co-found a new publishing house, Paladin, where he commissioned such seminal books as Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch and brought iconic American writers to the UK public with books such as Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Moving to Pan Books in 1972, he added to its list of best-selling authors by publishing writers who went on to become household names such as Jackie Collins and Douglas Adams but where he also relaunched the storied Picador imprint, publishing a host of Booker Prize winners, among them Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Edmund White, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift as well as such iconic writers as Ryszard Kapuscinski, Angela Carter, Brett Easton Ellis, and Michael Herr, among many others, leading The Times of London to describe his tenure as producing "the Picador Generation".

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