Chatto was founded in 1855 by a bookseller-publisher called John Camden Hotten. On Hotten's death, Andrew Chatto, who had worked there since he was fifteen, acquired the business with a sleeping partner, W.E. Windus. In 1917, The Hogarth Press was founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and in 1946 this too came under Chatto’s management. The firm published many significant writers and classics –R.L Stevenson, Lytton Strachey, Marcel Proust, Laurie Lee, Christopher Isherwood, Rosamond Lehmann, Henry Green, Sigmund Freud and Iris Murdoch. Cecil Day-Lewis, poet laureate, was editorial director in the 1960s.

In 1969 Chatto joined forces with Jonathan Cape, then added The Bodley Head and later the Virago Press to their group. Carmen Callil, a founder of Virago, was Chatto’s managing director from 1982 to 1994. The publishing group was acquired by Random House in 1987, and in 1997 Sinclair Stevenson was merged with Chatto & Windus.

Chatto has continued the long tradition of publishing excellent literary fiction as well as great literary biography, memoirs, history, contemporary cultural comment, poetry and works in translation. Today, Chatto publishes novelists ranging from A.S.Byatt, Anita Desai, David Malouf, Javier Marias, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Amos Oz, Rose Tremain and Anne Tyler, to Fannie Flagg, Margaret Forster, Arthur Golden, Susan Hill, and Richard Russo; a new generation of novelists and poets includes Ruth Padel, Allison Pearson, D.J.Taylor, Gerard Woodward, Sadie Jones, Xiaolu, Edgar Keret and Jennie Rooney. Our non-fiction list features eminent names such as Peter Ackroyd, Michael Holroyd, Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Keneally, Helena Kennedy, Nigella Lawson, Blake Morrison, Andrew Solomon, David Starkey, Xinran and Marina Warner.

Chatto & Windus publishes many award-winning authors, including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and two Booker Prize winners - The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and Possession by A.S. Byatt.