Mary-Kay Wilmers, Hon. FRSL (born 19 July 1938) is an American editor and journalist. She was the editor of the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2021, and she remains consulting editor. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. Family and education Mary-Kay Wilmers was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in New York City. She lived in the United States for the first eight years of her childhood, by the end of which she had lived in 10 different homes and attended eight different schools in America and Europe. Her mother, Cecilia Eitington, was of Russian-Jewish descent, and her father's family were, she said, "very English", but they had come from Germany. For many years Wilmers worked on a book, published in 2009 as The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story, recounting the story of her mother's Russian relations, including the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon, as well as her grandfather's cousin Leonid Eitingon, an agent in Joseph Stalin's NKVD who was responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky. In 1946 Wilmers' parents moved to Europe, spending time in London, Portugal, Belgium, and Switzerland. Her father Charles Wilmers was President of Sofina, a Belgian multinational utilities holding company. Wilmers was educated in Brussels and at boarding school in England. She said that for some time she was happier speaking French than English. Her brother Robert G. Wilmers was an American billionaire and chairman of M&T Bank until his death in 2017. At Oxford University, where Wilmers read modern languages at St Hugh's College from 1957, she befriended Alan Bennett, later a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Bennett said about Wilmers's time at university: "Outside the novels of Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh, I had never come across anyone who behaved so confidently or in such a cosmopolitan fashion". For the week of her finals she moved into the Randolph Hotel, staying with her father whose presence was required due to her threat to not sit the exams. Career Early career After her graduation in 1960, she thought about becoming a translator at the United Nations, but instead went to work at the publishers Faber and Faber, employed at first as a secretary. On one occasion she thought she might be sacked for saying "bugger" in front of T. S. Eliot, whose letters she used to type. She later became