2000: Margaret Atwood wins Man Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood wins the Man Booker for The Blind Assassin. We have now published twenty-five of her books over thirty-five years and sold 3.5 million copies. Five years later Margaret Atwood wins the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Enlightenment Award to mark a distinguished contribution to world literature and thought.

2002: Sarah Waters wins Author of the Year Award

Sarah Waters shortlisted for both the Orange and Man Booker prizes for Fingersmith and a year later wins The South Bank Show Award for Literature, the Author of the Year Award at the  British Book Awards, The Bookseller’s Association Awards and also Waterstone’s Author of the Year Award.

2002: Virago acquires Daphne du Maurier’s books

Virago Modern Classics acquires the complete list of twenty-seven of Daphne du Maurier’s books.

2003: The Bookseller of Kabul is Published

Virago publishes Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul which will go on to win a Nielsen Golden Book Award for selling 500,000 copies.

2003: Virago celebrates 30 years with Margaret Atwood poem

Virago celebrates thirty years of publishing the best of women’s writing, as commemorated in this poem by Margaret Atwood.

2003: The Birth of Venus

Sarah Dunant publishes The Birth of Venus, beginning a stellar career writing Italian  Renaissance novels, including the marvellous Blood & Beauty (2013).

2004: Three Orange shortlisted titles are published by Virago

Three of the six Orange shortlisted titles are published by Virago: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire, Gillian Slovo’s The Ice Road. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard goes on to win The Miles Franklin Award.

2008: The VMCs are thirty

The Virago Modern Classics are thirty and Donna Coonan, Virago Modern Classics’ editor, launches the Hardback Designer Classics Series.

2008: A Woman in Berlin

First published in German in the 1950s, the startling anonymous account of a German survivor of the Second World War.

‘A war diary unlike any other . . . One of the most important personal accounts ever written’ – Antony Beevor

2006: The Night Watch hits number one

Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch hits Number One in the hardback fiction bestseller list, is  shortlisted for the Orange and the Man Booker and she wins the Stonewall Writer of the Year Award (and again in 2009).

2006: Little, Brown is sold to the Hachette Book Group

Little, Brown is sold to Hachette Book Group and soon after move to Blackfriars Bridge, London.

2007: Barbara Pym becomes a classic

2007: Waris Dirie wins Mind Book of the Year

Waris Dirie, author of Desert Flower is awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Michele Hanson’s Living with Mother wins The Mind Book of the Year.

2008: The Clothes on their Backs shortlisted for Man Booker

Linda Grant is shortlisted for Man Booker for The Clothes on their Backs (two years earlier she won the Lettre Ulysses Award for literary reportage for The People on the Street and in 2009 she wins The South Bank Award for Literature).

2008: Stella Duffy wins Writer of the Year

In 2008, Stella Duffy wins the prestigious Stonewall Writer of the Year award for The Room of Lost Things. Two years later she wins the award again for Theodora.

2009: Home wins Orange Prize

Marilynne Robinson wins the Orange Prize for Home.

2009: Chart Toppers

Frances Osborne’s The Bolter hits number one in the non-fiction spot. Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad, shortlisted for four other non-fiction awards, wins the Medical Journalists Award and Susie Boyt is shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for her memoir, My Judy Garland Life.