Kijun Times

By SAM ROBERTSAUG. 6, 2015

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Carol Janeway

Carol Brown Janeway, a Scottish-born publishing executive, editor and award-winning translator who introduced American readers to dozens of international authors, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 71.

Sonny Mehta, the chairman and editor in chief of the Knopf Doubleday Group, said that Ms. Janeway died two weeks after receiving a cancer diagnosis. She had joined Alfred A. Knopf, which later merged with Doubleday, in 1970 as a vice president, senior editor and director of international rights.

Ms. Janeway, who had studied languages at Cambridge University in England, translated books from German, Hungarian and Dutch. Her first translation for Knopf was Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s “Das Boot,” which she followed with, among others, Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” (1997), Sandor Marai’s “Embers” (2002), Thomas Bernhard’s “My Prizes” (2010), Margriet de Moor’s “The Storm” (2010), Ferdinand von Schirach’s “Crime” (2011) and Daniel Kehlmann’s “F” (2014).

Ms. Janeway published the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Imre Kertesz and Thomas Mann as well as the authors José Donoso, Ivan Klima, Yukio Mishima, Elsa Morante, Robert Musil and Patrick Süskind.

Liesl Schillinger wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Ms. Janeway’s translation of “Embers” was “mellifluous and resonant.”

Jonathan Segal, her colleague at Knopf, said that Ms. Janeway “could recognize quality in a heartbeat, as many editors can, but she could do it in French and German as well as English.” Mr. Mehta said she had also been “a master negotiator when it came to selling our books to other publishers” abroad.

Carol Janet Brown was born in Edinburgh on Feb. 4, 1944, the daughter of R.G.A. Brown and the former Kathleen Neely. Her father was a senior partner in an accounting firm. Her mother was a civil service administrator.

She graduated with a degree in modern and medieval languages from Girton College at Cambridge (Mr. Mehta also attended Cambridge at the time).

Before joining Knopf, she worked at John Farquharson, a London literary agency, which represented the economist Eliot Janeway and his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Janeway. Her first marriage, to their son William H. Janeway, ended in divorce. She later married Erwin Glikes, a publisher, who died in 1994. She is survived by her sister, Ann Hughes.