Tom Maschler
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Tom Maschler (born 1933) is a British publisher and writer.
The son of Austrian Jews, he was five when his family fled to England from Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria. After Leighton Park School, he travelled widely, worked on a kibbutz and did national service before going on to work in publishing.
In his role as head of Jonathan Cape, he discovered and published many writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Ian McEwan and Bruce Chatwin, to whom he acted as an informal patron. Chatwin's novel On The Black Hill was inspired by a stay at Maschler's Welsh holiday cottage on the English-Welsh borders, and it was there that Chatwin wrote most of the manuscript.
One of Maschler's earliest coups was purchasing Joseph Heller's Catch 22 for £250. He also was one of the key figures responsible for creating the Booker Prize in the late Sixties - envisaged as a British version of the French Prix Goncourt. His memoir, Publisher, was published in 2005.
He was married to Fay Maschler, the long-serving London Evening Standard restaurant critic, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1988, he married Regina Kulinicz to whom he is still married.
