Founded in 1898 by Gerald Duckworth, Duckworth is an independent British publisher. It was important in the development of English literature in the first half of the twentieth century, being the publisher of figures such as Virginia Woolf (Gerald Duckworth's half-sister), Anthony Powell, John Galsworthy and D. H. Lawrence.
In 2003, the company suffered a financial collapse and was put into receivership. Its assets and goodwill were bought by Peter Mayer, a former chief executive of Penguin Books, who already owned the Overlook Press of New York. The May 2007 edition of Publishing Trends reports that Duckworth's trade books are now to be published under a Duckworth/Overlook imprint.
Duckworth has a number of imprints:
In 2006, Duckworth published An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin by Rohan Kriwaczek; this book was subsequently found to be a hoax, the funerary violin never having existed.
The 13-digit ISBN prefix for Duckworth is 97807156.

Duckworth General publishes literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction, including history, biography and memoir. As of 2007, authors whose work is available under the Duckworth General imprint include John Bayley, Beryl Bainbridge, Robert Littell, Joan Bakewell, Mary Warnock, William Vollmann and Helmut Newton, though many of these have also published with other companies. The company claims recent successes with Clive Woodall's One for Sorrow and J J Connolly's Layer Cake, which reached number one and two respectively on the independent publisher bestseller list.
Duckworth Academic publishes scholoary monographs, specialising in history and related areas, including Archaeology, Classics, Ancient History and Ancient Philosophy. It has an extensive backlist of titles published under the Duckworth and Bristol Classical Press imprints, and these include school and student texts in Latin, Greek, Russian, French, German and Spanish language and literature.
Ardis publishes Russian literature in translation.
Duckworth has republished a number of editions first issued by the Nonesuch Press.