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Penguin Group Canada to launch prestigious Allen Lane imprint

In celebration of its 75th Anniversary in 2010, Penguin Group (Canada) will launch Allen Lane Canada, a new prestige imprint for non-fiction that's grounded in the legacy of the company's founder. The imprint will be managed by Publishing Director Diane Turbide, director of Penguin's iconic Extraordinary Canadians series and editor of such authors as Adrienne Clarkson, Tim Cook, Michael Ignatieff, Margaret MacMillan, Lawrence Martin, Philip Slayton, and John Ralston Saul.

Allen Lane, established in the UK in 1967, encompasses some of the most exciting, provocative, opinion-forming authors writing today: environmental iconoclasts James Lovelock and George Monbiot, legendary journalists Alistair Cooke and Ryszard Kapuscinski, controversial scientists Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins, anti-globalization guru Joseph Stiglitz, political crusaders Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser, the world's leading expert on Nazi Germany, Ian Kershaw, charismatic contrarian Niall Ferguson, and a host of cultural trend-spotters such as Malcolm Gladwell.

"Allen Lane Canada will embrace the same philosophy," says Diane Turbide. "These will be books that challenge readers, start conversations, and make headlines. They will also be books with lasting appeal and an abiding commitment to quality—in short, books that matter."

In Canada, the Allen Lane imprint will launch with a new series entitled The History of Canada, co-edited by eminent historians Margaret MacMillan and Robert Bothwell, and a new book by award-winning author and Great War historian Tim Cook entitled The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie.

"The History of Canada series," says Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris, 1919 and Nixon in China, "is about those defining moments when the course of Canadian history and the nature of Canada itself were oscillating. It is about the human beings—heroic, flawed, wise, foolish, complex—who had to make decisions without knowing what the consequences might be."

The first book in the series, by historian and BBC journalist Dan Snow, is Death or Victory: The Battle of Quebec and the Birth of an Empire. In total, 12 to 14 books will be published in the series over the upcoming five years.

The launch of the History of Canada series in September will be the penultimate event in Penguin Canada's 75th anniversary year, followed by a landmark publishing event in November: a highly anticipated history of China and the West by Dr. Henry Kissinger, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, professor of history at Harvard, and renowned expert on China.

Click here to read the full press release, and click here to read a brochure on the launch of Allen Lane Canada.