[1][2] She attended school in New York and Switzerland, living with her mother and sister, before going on to Keele University to read for a degree in politics, philosophy and economics.
[1] In 1960, she answered an advertisement in The Bookseller that led her to buy a 50 per cent stake in the small independent publishing company run by John Calder in London.
The resultant publishing house, Calder and Boyars, published books by authors including Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Henry Miller, Eugene Ionesco, Peter Weiss and William S. Burroughs, until the firm split in 1975.
[1] She then formed Marion Boyars Publishers, and working with her husband Arthur (described as her "literary guide and cheerleader")[3] built up an eclectic list of translated fiction (including by such authors as Julio Cortázar, Latife Tekin, Vasily Shukshin and Witold Gombrowicz), as well as books on music and cinema.
[2] On her death, her younger daughter Catheryn Kilgarriff took over the running of Marion Boyars Publishers.