The company was founded in 1951 by Peter Owen, who had previously worked for Stanley Unwin at The Bodley Head.
[2] Owen's first editor was Muriel Spark, who would later write a novel called A Far Cry From Kensington drawing on her experiences working there.
[3] Their published authors include Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, the Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo, the Spanish writers Julio Llamazares,[4] José Ovejero, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Antonio Soler and Salvador Dalí,[5] as well as André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Anna Kavan, Anaïs Nin,[6] Natsume Sōseki, Yukio Mishima, Gertrude Stein, Hermann Hesse,[2] Karoline Leach, the revisionist biographer of Lewis Carroll, Hans Henny Jahnn, Tarjei Vesaas and Miranda Miller.
In 1991, Owen compiled an anthology to commemorate forty years of publishing, The Peter Owen Anthology: Forty Years of Independent Publishing.
[7] The company records are held in Special Collections at the University of Delaware.