HarperCollins Announces Harper Flamingo Imprint

Posted on September 2, 1997

HarperCollins Publishers has announced the creation of its newest imprint, Harper Flamingo, which will be devoted specifically to literary titles, both fiction and nonfiction.

Flamingo, which already exists as a literary imprint of HarperCollins in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, will be launched in the U.S. in January 1998.

In announcing the new imprint, Anthea Disney, President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, said, "We have always had a rich tradition at Harper, from Herman Melville to Richard Wright, and we have consistently published some of the most important contemporary writers in the country. We want to celebrate this ongoing heritage through Harper Flamingo, with such long-standing house-authors as Barbara Kingsolver, Milan Kundera, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Ron Hansen, Oscar Hijuelos, Doris Lessing, and Louise Erdrich, and with a selective list of the most talented new voices in America."

Titles published under the new imprint will be identified as Harper Flamingo books and will be presented to booksellers and readers with focused, carefully crafted individual campaigns, as well as advertising promotion and Internet marketing for the line. Joelle Delbourgo, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher for HarperCollins and Susan Weinberg, Publishing Director, Harper Perennial, will oversee the new imprint; among the key editors acquiring for Harper Flamingo are Terry Karten and Robert Jones.

"The launch of Harper Flamingo will showcase a HarperCollins strength," said Delbourgo. "It will better highlight our literary titles for reviewers and to the media, and bring a new level of attention to the house as a whole, with regard to critical attention and awards."

Harper Flamingo's inaugural hardcover list includes new novels by such established authors as Russell Banks, whose Cloudsplitter is a fictional account of John Brown; Louise Erdrich's new novel, The Antelope Wife; and Isabel Allende's delightful meditation on the nexus between food and eroticism, Aphrodite. Also on the first list are internationally acclaimed Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, with an imaginative and lyrical retelling of the story of Elijah the Prophet, The Fifth Mountain; award-winning poet Mark Doty's new collection, Sweet Machine; Jo-Ann Mapson's Loving Chloe; Lady Moses, a stunning first novel by Lucinda Roy, and Marya Hornbacher's groundbreaking memoir of anorexia nervosa, Wasted. Among the titles Flamingo will publish in paperback are two acclaimed first novels, Patricia Chao's Monkey King, and Mike Magnuson's The Right Man for the Job. Movie tie-in editions of Russell Banks' novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter are also planned.

"It is exactly this combination of celebrated writers at the peak of their career with newer writers of unusual distinction that will define the special quality of Harper Flamingo and put it in the forefront of literary publishing," said Weinberg.