Prominent literary editor Ellen Seligman dies
Canadian literature has lost one of its guiding hands.
Ellen Seligman, l ongtime editor and publisher at McClelland & Stewart, died Friday. Seligman was the editor of, among others, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Elizabeth Hay, Anne Michaels, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Robinson, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Her authors have won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Giller Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and many more. Seligman was also the publisher of Nobel Prize win- ner Alice Munro. “All of us lucky enough to work with Ellen will have been inspired by the energy, creativity, elegance, and intelligence she brought to everything she did,” Kristin Cochrane, president and publisher of M&S’s parent company, Penguin Random House Canada, said in a statement.
“She was a generous colleague and collaborator. She worked to the highest of standards, raising the game for everyone around her, all the while sharing her love of publishing.”
Seligman’s career began in her hometown of New York City before she moved to London and finally to Toronto and McClelland & Stew- art, her home for nearly four decades. During her career she was known to be unfailingly loyal to her established authors and ceaselessly willing to help her younger writers develop their own literary careers.
She was admired in publishing circles well beyond the country’s borders, and though they may not have known it, by readers around the world through many of the great novels to emerge from Canada since the late 1970s.
In her adopted country, where the literary world is a small and intimate one, her loss will be especially significant. Seligman is survived by her partner James Polk and her sister Margaret Seligman.
There will be a private family funeral, followed by a public memorial, with details to come.