Louise Dennys would like to make one thing absolutely clear about her recent change in job title at her employer, Penguin Random House Canada: she is not retiring.

“Penguin Random House and Kristin didn’t want to use the word ‘retirement’ in the announcement,” Dennys says on the phone from her home in Toronto, referring to Kristin Cochrane, PRHC’s CEO. Dennys and Cochrane had been in discussions about the former’s future role with the company for close to two years before breaking the news, shortly before the 2022 holiday break, that Dennys would be stepping back from her post as executive publisher and executive vice-president at PRHC. She will be taking up the newly created mantle of publisher emerita, which will allow her to keep her hand in the operations at PRHC while also providing greater flexibility for her to pursue her own passion projects.

“I intend to still be very active,” she says.

Not that this should come as any surprise: since coming to Canada from Britain in 1971, she has been a powerful force in the Canadian publishing industry, first with the eponymous house Lester & Orpen Dennys, which she ran with partner Malcolm Lester after the death of Eve Orpen, then as publisher of Knopf Canada, the only international imprint outside of New York City to bear the name of iconic publisher Alfred A. Knopf. She started as publisher of the newly formed Knopf Canada in 1991 at the behest of the late Sonny Mehta, publisher of Knopf in the U.S. and himself a legend in the industry.

It was her success at L&OD that helped convince both Mehta and Dennys herself that she would be a good fit for the new Knopf imprint. “I feel that some of the groundbreaking work was done initially through the Lester & Orpen Dennys decade,” she says. It was during that period in the 1980s that Dennys helped spearhead the selling of Canadian rights internationally in a concerted fashion, as well as signing major and upcoming international authors to Canadian publishing and distribution deals. L&OD were responsible for publishing work by Graham Greene (who also happens to have been Dennys’s uncle), Italo Calvino, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Many of those authors, including Amis, McEwan, and future Nobel laureate Ishiguro, followed Dennys to Knopf.

Her arrival at Knopf Canada was the result of a call from Mehta that came “out of the blue,” according to Dennys. After it became clear that L&OD was not going to be viable in the long term, Dennys was scouting around for a way to launch another imprint domestically (Lester chose to partner with Anna Porter, who then ran Key Porter Books). Mehta got in touch to offer her the opportunity to inaugurate Knopf Canada, and she jumped at the chance. “Malcolm chose to go with Anna, who I adore,” Dennys says. “But I didn’t think I would be able to publish the kinds of writers I had been publishing up until then.”

Flash forward three decades and Knopf Canada has become a powerhouse in the publishing landscape, not just in this country but internationally. Most of which is due to Dennys – her persistence, connections, and publishing savvy. “Having a great publishing list is a little bit like having a great dinner party,” Dennys says. “Who sits beside whom on the list is really important.”

The significance of this attitude is readily apparent from a simple glance at Knopf Canada’s list, which is reflective of Dennys’s cosmopolitan attitude toward publishing. In addition to the authors who followed her from L&OD, Knopf Canada has become home to iconic writers such as Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, and Orhan Pamuk, as well as Canadians Miriam Toews, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Wayne Johnston, Sheila Heti, and Naomi Klein. “If you want to be doing publishing at a world level, you need to be in conversation with the world,” Dennys says. “What I am thrilled about is that when you walk into offices in New York or London, they don’t look at you as though you’re an alien from another planet when you say you come from Canada.”

Having created arguably the most prestigious literary dinner party in Canadian publishing, Dennys has secured her place in the roster of towering industry figures, notwithstanding the fact that she has not held the title of Knopf Canada publisher for more than a decade. That role is currently held by Martha Kanya-Forstner, who took over as publisher in 2021. The title publisher emerita was created jointly by Cochrane and former PRH global CEO Markus Dohle as a recognition of Dennys’s singular importance to the international corporate brand. “It’s an honorific title created uniquely for Louise to recognize the indelible contributions she has made over many decades,” Cochrane says.

In the immediate term, the new relationship will allow Dennys to step away from the day-to-day responsibilities of running a publishing house in order to expand her focus into other areas. While she maintains connections with publishing-adjacent organizations like PEN Canada and Canopy, a sustainability organization that works with pulp and paper producers to find environmentally friendly options for recycled paper, she also cares passionately about social justice issues and sits as a director of the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, an organization launched in 2016 by Dennys’s husband, Ric Young.

The position of publisher emerita allows Dennys the opportunity to expand her focus to include these other projects while also keeping involved in her first love, publishing. “As a publisher and an editor, 24 hours of the day your head is glued to a manuscript or glued to the marketing or glued to the sales,” she says. The new arrangement allows her to poke her head up and take the lay of the land more broadly.

Just don’t suggest she’s retiring. “I may be busier than ever, for all I know,” she says with a laugh.