Malcolm Edwards, editor & publisher, 1949 - 2026

Malcolm had a central role in my so-called career. I first met him in the late 1980s, in his airy garret somewhere in the rooftops of the Gollancz warren in Covent Garden's Henrietta Street, after he bought the UK rights to my first two novels (published in Gollancz's classic yellow jackets, which fulfilled one of my childhood ambitions). He encouraged me to attend my first SF convention, and some years later was instrumental in my return to Gollancz, when he and Jo Fletcher bought the first two Quiet War novels. By then, he was a Deputy CEO of the Orion Group, which had acquired the Gollancz imprint, and would later become chair of Gollancz. His enthusiasm for the SF genre, and for British SF in particular, was a constant in his career -- he launched Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, bringing many classics of the genre back into print, and was an avid collector of books and genre magazines. He published J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, and when he visited Shanghai snaffled a quarto-sized leather-bound menu from the restaurant that occupied Ballard's childhood home, which he proudly showed to me at yet another convention. Ave atque vale.