Sylvia Whitman is the daughter of the shop's founder, George Whitman.
12 Facts About Sylvia Whitman
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Sylvia Whitman's mother was Felicity Leng, a young British woman who had a brief marriage with George.
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Sylvia Whitman attended boarding school at the Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh, graduating in 1999.
4.
Sylvia Whitman began co-managing Shakespeare and Company with her father in 2003 at the age of 21.
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Sylvia Whitman continues to run it today with her partner, David Delannet, in the same manner her father had, allowing young writers to live in the bookstore in exchange for helping out around the shop, agreeing to read a book a day, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop's archives.
6.
In 2003, Sylvia Whitman founded a biennial literary festival, FestivalandCo, which has hosted such writers as Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jeanette Winterson, Jung Chang, and Marjane Satrapi.
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In 2023, Sylvia Whitman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
8.
Sylvia Whitman appears, alongside her father, in the 2003 documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man.
9.
Sylvia Whitman appeared on the three Paris episodes of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which aired the first week of August 2011.
10.
Sylvia Whitman is the subject of a 2012 episode of Sundance Beginnings, documentary shorts directed by Chiara Clemente.
11.
Sylvia Whitman appears in an episode of the BBC television series Imagine, first broadcast in 2012: "Jeanette Winterson: My Monster and Me".
12.
Sylvia Whitman is featured in the three-part 2014 BBC television documentary series Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities by art historian James Fox in episode 2: "Paris 1928".