Erroll McDonald

Erroll McDonald is a Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Sponsored by Toni Morrison, he started his career working for legendary editor Jason Epstein and went on to hold editorial positions at Random House, Vintage, and Pantheon Books before his Knopf tenure.

The writers he has edited and published (seven of whom are Nobel laureates) include: Count Basie, Toni Cade Bambara, Romare Bearden, Harold Bloom, Chico Buarque, Margaret Busby, Italo Calvino, Patrick Chamoiseau, Sandra Cisneros, Julio Cortazar, Stanley Crouch, Jose Donoso,  Athol Fugard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Robert Gottlieb, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margo Jefferson, Simon Johnson, Randall Kennedy, Laura Kipnis, Tadeusz Konwicki, Laila Lalami, Fran Lebowitz, Daniel E. Lieberman, Wangari Maathai, David Malouf, Jay McInerney, Timothy Mo, Toni Morrison, Kary Mullis, Abdelrahman Munif, Albert Murray, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Richard Posner, V.S. Pritchett, Richard Pryor, Manuel Puig, David Reich, Salman Rushdie, Lucy Sante, Nina Simone, Wole Soyinka, Robert Farris Thompson, Henry Threadgill, Colm Toibin, Michel Tournier, The Honorable Eric Williams, and John Edgar Wideman.

Assessing his career, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says: “Erroll’s gift is not just his exquisite taste, but his moral clarity. He has devoted his life to widening the circle of literary excellence, to making sure that genius, wherever it appears, finds a home on the page. He does this without fanfare, without ego, and always with that mixture of elegance, mischief, and exacting intelligence that is uniquely his.”

Oprah Winfrey says: “Erroll has been a cornerstone of the publishing world from his first days as an intern at Penguin Random House…As a revered champion of authors and ideas, he has consistently elevated voices that challenge, that inspire and expand our understanding of our world. And his commitment to publishing stories that shift cultural narratives and break down stereotypes has opened doors for so many.”

A former chair of the board of directors of the Center for Fiction and trustee of PEN America, Erroll, in 2025, was the recipient of the American Book Award for Editor/Publisher (conferred by the Before Columbus Foundation) and of Literacy Partners’ Distinguished Leadership in Literacy Award. He is a Fellow of the New York Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.