Remembering Sonny Mehta: A champion editor with quiet humour and grace

Authors who worked with him recall Sonny Mehta's elegance, his wit and, above all, his fierce devotion to books and their writers

Sonny Mehta, the India-born, Cambridge-educated editor who for more than 30 years presided over Alfred A Knopf and the New York publishing scene with seemingly effortless grace and erudition, died on Monday at 77. Mehta published Nobelists and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as first-time authors, and here he is remembered by some of the writers whose careers he shaped. 

John Banville

I loved Sonny for his grace, his insouciance and his sly, quiet humour. When he first told me of the mysterious, debilitating illness that attacked him some years ago, he described how one day he found himself fallen onto the