I first met Peter Owen in the late 1980s, when he published some short stories that I had written about Saudi Arabia. I was invited to interesting parties at his house in Holland Park, west London, and at various embassies where he would launch the many translations of literary fiction he published. He genuinely liked writers, perhaps seeing his own single-minded obstinacy reflected in ours. My friend Francis King used to say that he had an unerring eye for quality in books, and Doris Lessing said of him: “I have admired Peter and his lone stand for years. He has published books that otherwise would not have been published. We owe a great debt to him and the few like him.”
In February he and his daughter Antonia came to lunch. Peter kept staring at a carved bookcase that, he said, reminded him of the furniture in the house where he had grown up in Germany. I was afraid he didn’t know who I was, but suddenly he looked at me very sharply and asked, “Where did Nina [a character in one of my novels] come from?”
His survival as an independent publisher for 65 years was an extraordinary achievement.
