Ajai Singh ‘Sonny’ Mehta

Sonny Mehta

New York City

1960–87 (studying at Cambridge and working in London; thereafter, Mehta visited frequently but resided in the United States)

Sonny Mehta was the most significant South Asian figure to shape British publishing in the twentieth century. He arrived in Britain as a student, remade the country’s reading habits as a young publisher and then left in middle age for New York. His influence on the London literary scene was profound, though its archival traces are few. Celebrated by colleagues and cherished by authors, Mehta has not yet received the scholarly attention he deserves.

Ajai Singh ‘Sonny’ Mehta was born in New Delhi in 1942. The son of a diplomat, Mehta travelled widely through the early years of Indian independence, living in Prague and Manhattan before returning to India at the age of 9. After boarding at Sanawar, he spent two years in Geneva before finishing his secondary education at Sevenoaks School in Kent. He would reside in England for the next twenty-seven years.

His roving youth instilled an easy cosmopolitanism, and his breadth of experience was reflected in the astonishing range of his reading. Throughout his life, Mehta was a reader above all, blessed with an omnivorous appetite for books and an instinctive sense of the possibilities in a text. His command of literature both high and low – along with his cool, reserved charisma – made a deep impression on contemporaries at Cambridge, where he completed degrees in English and History during the early 1960s. It was there that he met his wife, the Indian writer Gita Patnaik.

To make reading his profession and bring new books into the world, Mehta had to break open the white gentlemen’s club of mid-century British publishing. He spent nearly a year interviewing for jobs and being spoken to‘very slowly and very distinctly, in case I didn’t understand the English language’. Mehta’s first position was as an assistant at Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, fetching tea and reading manuscripts. Promoted when Granada bought the company, Mehta co-founded the Paladin paperback imprint, distributing exciting non-fiction to British readers. He commissioned Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), whose progress demonstrated his unequalled eye for the literary market and his penchant for editing with few words.

Mehta moved to Pan Books in 1974 as editorial director and took another imprint, Picador, to generation-defining heights. There he presided over a golden cohort of writers, among them Douglas Adams, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Clive James, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift. He published young British authors; he brought American works across the Atlantic; he drew in wider geographies. Mehta marketed these books with unprecedented flair. Kazuo Ishiguro told him that ‘it’s because of what you’ve done in publishing that people like me can get into print’ (Durden-Smith, p. 119).

In 1987 Mehta was handpicked to succeed Robert Gottlieb as editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf. The second half of his career was even more storied than the first; he achieved a publishing pre-eminence in the United States that surpassed his influence in Britain. Though Mehta visited London regularly, home became New York, where he led Knopf and chaired the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group until his death in 2019.