Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Storey,[2] William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.

In addition, the catalogues from the early years included books by Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Herbert Read, Max Eastman, George Rylands, John Dover Wilson, Geoffrey Keynes, Forrest Reid, Charles Williams, and Vita Sackville-West.

Poetry was originally the most renowned part of the Faber list, with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice joining Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wyndham Lewis, John Gould Fletcher, Roy Campbell, James Joyce, David Jones (artist-poet) and Walter de la Mare being published under T. S. Eliot's aegis.

[8] Under Geoffrey Faber's chairmanship, the board in 1929 included Eliot, Richard de la Mare, Charles Stewart, and Frank Vigor Morley.

[9] Faber published biographies, memoirs, fiction, poetry, political and religious essays, art and architecture monographs, children's books, and an ecology list.

Notable postwar Faber writers include William Golding (although the company almost rejected his Lord of the Flies),[10] Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Graham, Philip Larkin, P. D. James, Tom Stoppard, and John Osborne.

The firm increased its investment in contemporary drama, including plays by three Nobel Laureates: Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and T. S. Eliot.

In addition, Faber has published the translated work of prominent novelists and poets including Milan Kundera, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, Nikos Kazantzakis, Wisława Szymborska, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Czesław Miłosz.

Faber announced in October 2011 that Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of the band Pulp, would be joining as editor-at-large, an appointment similar to one held by Pete Townshend of The Who in the 1980s.

[14] Faber's American arm was sold in 1998 to Farrar, Straus and Giroux ("FSG"), where it remained as an imprint focused on arts, entertainment, media, and popular culture.