Kent Carroll has retired as publisher-at-large at Europa Editions, the publisher announced in a press release on February 6. Carroll's retirement come after a more than 50 year career in publishing.
Carroll began his career with Grove Press in the 1970s. At Grove, he acquired the surprise bestseller, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, published Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, edited Norman Mailer, and fought for the right to publish and distribute such “banned” titles as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
In the early 1980s, he left Grove alongside Herman Graf to found Carroll & Graf, which, by 1995, was publishing 125 titles per year by such authors as Beryl Bainbridge, Anthony Burgess, and Penelope Fitzgerald.
In 2004, Carroll joined Europa Editions, where he has worked with such authors as Steve Erickson, Jane Gardam, Damon Galgut, Andrew Miller, and Fay Weldon.
“Kent brought experience, knowledge, contacts, grace, and aplomb to what was scrappy start-up independent press in 2004,” Michael Reynolds, Europa’s executive publisher, said in a statement. “Quite simply, Europa would not be the company it is today without Kent’s contribution.”
