Melville House Books

Drenka Willen

Just a few months after being unceremoniously fired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, then being rehired a short time later, longtime HMH senior editor Drenka Willen was awarded the London Book Fair’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing yesterday. Willen, editor of Nobel winners including Günter Grass, Jose Saramago, Wislawa Szymborska and Octavio Paz, was honored at a ceremony that featured Umberto Eco — another of her authors — who flew to London specifically to present her with the award.

According to a report in Publishers Weekly by Liz Thompson, “In her acceptance speech, Willen said that while the last 40 years had its share of ‘fears, mistakes, errors of judgment, lack of courage, narrow gutters, appalling jackets, bad PNLs,’ as well bringing authors to the U.S. ‘to give readings attended exclusively by Harcourt staff and other homeless people,’ she prefers to remember the achievements of Helen and Kurt Wolff Books and its predecessor institutions.”

Willen also observed that “ownerships have changed in the last hundred years as have publishers, natural and man-made disasters have been suffered, but great books by great authors are here to stay.â€

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.