18 Facts About Mary-Kay Wilmers

Mary-Kay Wilmers was the editor of the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2021, and she remains consulting editor.

Mary-Kay Wilmers is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.

Mary-Kay Wilmers was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in New York City.

Mary-Kay Wilmers lived in the United States for the first eight years of her childhood, by the end of which she had lived in 10 different homes and attended eight different schools in America and Europe.

For many years Wilmers worked on a book, published in 2009 as The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story, recounting the story of her mother's Russian relations, including the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon, as well as her grandfather's cousin Leonid Eitingon, an agent in Joseph Stalin's NKVD who was responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

In 1946 Mary-Kay Wilmers' parents moved to Europe, spending time in London, Portugal, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Mary-Kay Wilmers was educated in Brussels and at boarding school in England.

Mary-Kay Wilmers said that for some time she was happier speaking French than English.

At Oxford University, where Mary-Kay Wilmers read modern languages at St Hugh's College from 1957, she befriended Alan Bennett, later a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Mary-Kay Wilmers later became an editor at Faber and Faber, where she commissioned many books, among them Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes, one of the first works of British feminism.

Mary-Kay Wilmers left Faber aged 29 to become deputy editor of The Listener, edited by Karl Miller, and in the 1970s had a spell at The Times Literary Supplement.

In 1979, Mary-Kay Wilmers joined Miller in founding London Review of Books, conceived to fill a gap in the market as a year-long industrial dispute had closed The Times Literary Supplement.

The New York Review of Books withdrew its support after a few months, and in May 1980, Mary-Kay Wilmers made the first of a number of investments of money inherited from her father, establishing an independent London Review of Books and later making herself the majority shareholder.

Mary-Kay Wilmers stepped down as editor after almost 30 years in 2021, remaining at the magazine as consulting editor.

Politically, the review is not known for following a consistent party political line, although Mary-Kay Wilmers described herself as being "captivated by the left but not of it".

Mary-Kay Wilmers has herself said, "I'm unambiguously hostile to Israel because it's a mendacious state", an assessment that has not gone unchallenged.

In 1968, Mary-Kay Wilmers married film director Stephen Frears, with whom she had two sons, Sam and Will.

Nina Stibbe, the live-in nanny that Mary-Kay Wilmers hired in the early 1980s, wrote letters home that described the North London "literati" life; these were compiled, published, and adapted into the 2016 TV series Love, Nina.