Susannah Hunnewell, 1966–2019

Photograph by Stephen Andrew Hiltner.

The Paris Review mourns the loss of publisher Susannah Hunnewell, friend, colleague, and luminous presence at the magazine for three decades, who passed away on June 15 at her home in New York. She was 52.

Susannah Gordon Hunnewell was born in Boston and spent much of her childhood in Paris. She attended Harvard, where she studied English with the as an editorial assistant in the summer of 1989. George Plimpton, the magazine’s founding editor, quickly recognized her literary precociousness, commitment to international literature, and “herculean” work ethic, and in her first years at the quarterly she translated Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s from the original Spanish, worked on fiction by Niccolò Tucci, and helped George in editing (1990) and the first (1989). Those early years at the magazine were fortuitous in another way: it was during her first summer in the cramped office on East Seventy-Second that she met Antonio Weiss, then the magazine’s associate editor, whom she would marry in 1993. The couple went on to have three sons.