Founded in 1984 by Dorothy Connell and Sherman Carroll, two American academics and human rights activists living in London, Readers International made its name by featuring works and authors that suffered political censorship or exile in their home country. Thus in the closing years of the Cold War and the military terror in Latin America's Southern Cone, RI successfully brought international acclaim for the first time to major writers like Chilean Antonio Skármeta (I Dreamt the Snow was Burning, Watch Where the Wolf is Going), Argentinian Marta Traba (Mothers and Shadows), and the Czech writers Ivan Klima (My Merry Mornings) and Ludvik Vaculik (A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator). In purely literary terms, RI pioneered in bringing the most important contemporary Nicaraguan novel into English (To Bury Our Fathers by Sergio Ramirez); in introducing major works by two generations of Korea's best modern writers, the elderly Hwang Sun-won (The Book of Masks) and the young Yun Heung-gil (The House of Twilight); and in making available in the US a unique list of South African literature by that country's previously ignored black and Asian writers: Sipho Sepamla, Njabulo Ndebele, Ahmed Essop, Es'kia Mphahlele, and Richard Rive. RI's list includes the first Arab winner of the prestigious Israel Literary Prize, the Palestinian writer Emile Habiby (The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist - his only book available in English).

Since its inception, RI has only given prominence to women writers, including Yang Jiang (A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters - China), Linda Ty-Casper (Awaiting Trespass and Wings of Stone - Philippines), Monika Maron (Flight of Ashes and The Defector - former East Germany), Cristina Peri Rossi (Ship of Fools - Uruguay) and Mireya Robles (Hagiography of Narcisa the Beautiful - Cuba).

With the political changes of the early 1990's in Europe, Latin America and Africa, RI finds itself in a special position to reflect the current intellectual debates and literary renascences in these regions as prominent exiles return (e.g., Ariel Dorfman's Hard Rain), new voices are heard (e.g., Agnes Hankiss' post-communist novel, A Hungarian Romance), and once-banned classics are rediscovered (e.g., the powerful Catalan feminist novel Solitude). With Dorothy still at the helm, Readers International is looking forward to a successful future of small press publishing.