Born in 1942, the son of Amrik Singh Mehta among the first of independent India"s diplomats, Sonny Mehta was educated at Sanawar School, India, and Sevenoaks School, United Kingdom, where he won an open scholarship to Cambridge University, acquiring two degrees, in History and English Literature, while also editing the magazine Granta.
He began his publishing career in 1965 in London at Rupert Hart-Davis, then joined Granada Publishing in 1966 to co-found a new publishing house, Paladin, where he commissioned such seminal books as Germaine Greer"s The Female Eunuch and brought iconic American writers to the United Kingdom public with books such as Hunter Thompson"s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In 1987 Mehta moved from London to New York to head the legendary American literary imprint Alfred A. Knopf as President and Editor-in-Chief. Mehta"s tenure has also been known for important new translations of books by Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Albert Camus, as well as its wildly popular bestsellers, from Ken Burns"s history of the Civil War to Michael Crichton"s Jurassic Park, from Steig Larsson"s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and James Ellroy"s work to the Fifty Shades of Grey books
Mehta was also among the first to recognize the importance of the new genre of graphic novels, publishing prize-winning titles such as Maus and Persepolis.
The addition of Pantheon, Vintage Books, Schocken and Everyman"s Library to the Knopf Publishing Group, and later the Doubleday group—all working under Mehta"s direction—have led him to be described as the world"s most important anglophone publisher.
Mehta has won Lifetime Achievement Awards for publishing in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Bard College, He is in the Hall of Fame in Vanity Fair′s Best-Dressed Men in the World list. He was named 2015 Person of the Year by Publishers Weekly.
