Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta (9 November 1942 – 30 December 2019) was an Indian editor and the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Early life Born in New Delhi on 9 November 1942, Sonny Mehta was the son of Amrik Singh Mehta, an officer in the Royal Indian Air Force and among the first of independent India's diplomats, and Satinder (Duggal) Singh. As a child, Mehta lived all over the world, including Prague, New York City, Nepal and Geneva. He was educated at the Lawrence School, Sanawar, and Sevenoaks School in Kent, where he won an open scholarship to St Catharine's College, Cambridge. At Cambridge University he read History and English Literature and worked on the magazine Granta. Career Mehta 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 Germaine Greer's influential The Female Eunuch and brought American writers to the UK public with books including Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Moving to Pan Books in 1972, Mehta added to its list of best-selling authors by publishing writers who went on to become household names, including Jackie Collins and Douglas Adams, and launched there the Picador imprint, publishing Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Edmund White, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, as well as Ryszard Kapuściński, Angela Carter, Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Herr, leading The Times to describe his tenure as producing "the Picador Generation". In 1987, Mehta moved from London to New York City to head the American literary imprint Alfred A. Knopf as president and editor-in-chief. Mehta was chosen by Robert Gottlieb, who was leaving Knopf to edit The New Yorker. On Mehta's watch, Knopf published six Nobel literature laureates (Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertész, V. S. Naipaul, and Toni Morrison), numerous Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize and National Book Award winners, and continued the tradition of publishing important French, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, South American, African, Asian writers as well as work by such contemporary leaders as U.S. presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and Pope John Paul II. Mehta's tenure at Knopf featured new translations of Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Albert Camus; bestsellers included Ken Burns's history of the Civil War, Michael