Background
She was born Ursula Margaret Sachs in Oxford, England, to Emma Boehm and Werner Sachs, a chemical engineer who became managing director of a multinational company dealing with non-ferrous metals.
She was born Ursula Margaret Sachs in Oxford, England, to Emma Boehm and Werner Sachs, a chemical engineer who became managing director of a multinational company dealing with non-ferrous metals.
Owen was educated at Putney High School and from there went to Street Hugh"s College, where she studied medicine and took a Bachelor of Arts in Physiology. She then moved into the social sciences, taking a Graduate Diploma at Bedford College in London, and working for some years as a social worker and researcher into mental health issues.
Her parents were German Jews, and Owen spent the first 18 months of her life in Berlin, after which the family was forced to leave Nazi Germany and came to London. She entered the publishing profession as an editor at Frank Cass in the early 1970s. She then worked briefly at Barrie & Jenkins.
In 1974, Owen became a founder director of Virago Press.
As editorial director and later managing director she oversaw the creation of the Virago list. She remained on Virago"s board until the company was sold to Little, Brown and Company in 1996.
In 1990 Owen was appointed director of the Paul Hamlyn Fund and cultural policy advisor to the Labour Party. The fund was established to promote and develop Labour"s cultural policies under the Shadow Arts Minister Mark Fisher in the run-up to the 1992 general election.
In 1993, she became editor and chief executive of Index on Censorship, a magazine for free expression founded by Stephen Spender in 1972.
Owen relaunched the magazine, increasing its sales and media profile. She travelled widely for the magazine. Free Word was conceived in 2004, and Owen took it through from an idea to concrete reality, finding the funding from Norwegian foundation Fritt Ord to buy a building for the centre in Farringdon Road.
lieutenant opened in June 2009.
Owen is on the board of the South Bank Centre and English Touring Opera. She has been a governor of Parliament Hill Field School, on the board of the New Statesman and the committee of the Royal Literary Fund.
She has lived in Egypt, Lebanon and the United States. Owen is the editor of Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (Virago, 1983) and Whose Cities (with Mark Fisher), published by Penguin in 1991.
