Andrew Kidd Hon. FRSL, is a British publisher, who has served as the CEO of the Arvon Foundation since 2019. [1] [2] He co-founded the Folio Prize in 2014, and serves as its chair. [3] In 2023, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [4] [5]
By 2002, Kidd was serving as the editorial director of Penguin Books, and a publisher for Picador, [6] before being promoted to head Macmillan Publishers by 2006. [7] By 2008, he was appointed managing director of Aitken Alexander Associates. [8] In 2014, Kidd left Aitken Alexander Associates, [9] and co-founded the digital reading platform Alexi Books. [10] [11]
In 2015, the Evening Standard named Kidd on the Progress 1000, a list of London's most influential people. [12] As of 2019, Kidd has published works by authors John Updike, Matthew Kneale, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edward St Aubyn, Ann Duffy, Jim Crace, Bret Easton Ellis, Jackie Kay, Alan Hollinghurst, Cormac McCarthy, and John Banville. [1]
Donald Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician. His work has won several awards, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2009.
Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, was an Australian publisher, writer and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. She has been described by Gail Rebuck as "the most extraordinary publisher of her generation".
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Alexander Craig "Alec" Aitken was one of New Zealand's most eminent mathematicians. In a 1935 paper he introduced the concept of generalized least squares, along with now standard vector/matrix notation for the linear regression model. Another influential paper co-authored with his student Harold Silverstone established the lower bound on the variance of an estimator, now known as Cramér–Rao bound. He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature for his World War I memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme.
Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta was a British and American editor. Mehta was the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Benjamin Myers is an English writer and journalist.
The Arvon Foundation is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom that promotes creative writing. Arvon is one of Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisations.
Paul Farley, FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Michael Donaghy was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.
Wayne McGregor, CBE is a British choreographer and director who has won multiple awards. He is the Artistic Director of Studio Wayne McGregor and Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. McGregor was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 2011 for Services to Dance.
Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Atlantic Books is an independent British publishing house, with its headquarters in Ormond House in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden. It is perhaps best known for publishing Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger, which received the 40th Man Booker Prize in 2008, and for its long-standing relationship with the late Christopher Hitchens.
Sir Benjamin William Elliot is a British businessman and fund-raiser for the Conservative Party who served as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party from July 2019 alongside James Cleverly (2019–2020), Amanda Milling (2020–2021), Oliver Dowden (2021–2022), and Andrew Stephenson (2022) before resigning on 5 September 2022. In 2018, Elliot was appointed by Michael Gove, the secretary of state for the environment, as the UK government's first Food Surplus and Waste Champion. Elliot is the co-founder of the Quintessentially Group, a global luxury concierge service, and the co-founder of Hawthorn Advisors, a communications consultancy based in London. He is a nephew of Queen Camilla.
Achilles James Daunt is a British businessman. He is the founder of the Daunt Books chain, and since May 2011 has been managing director of the bookshop chain Waterstones. Since August 2019, Daunt has also been CEO of Barnes & Noble, the American bookstore chain. He is known as "the man who saved Waterstones".
The Rathbones Folio Prize, previously known as the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017, the sponsor was Rathbone Investment Management. At the 2023 award ceremony, it was announced that the prize was looking for new sponsorship as Rathbones would be ending their support.
Adam Richard Kay is a British BAFTA-winning TV writer, author, comedian and former doctor. He is best known as author of the number-one bestselling book This Is Going to Hurt (2017). His television writing credits include This is Going to Hurt, Crims, Mrs. Brown's Boys and Mitchell and Webb.
Jacaranda Books is a Black owned British independent book publishing firm launched in 2012 and known for their effort promoting diversity in United Kingdom's publishing industry.
John Gilhooly,, OSI is a British and Irish arts administrator. He is currently artistic and executive director of Wigmore Hall.
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American writer and fashion designer. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he studied at the Scottish College of Textiles and London's Royal College of Art, before moving at the age of 24 to New York City, where he built a successful career in fashion design, while also beginning to write. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain – which had initially been turned down by many publishers on both sides of the Atlantic – was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize. His second novel, Young Mungo, was published in April 2022.
Ruth Borthwick, Hon. FRSL, is a British arts administrator, literature executive and educator, who for more than three decades has worked with writers in bookselling and publishing, and as an advocate for literature in the UK and internationally. In 2018, she was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Society of Literature, rewarding "significant contribution to the advancement of literature". Formerly chief executive and artistic director of the Arvon Foundation for ten years (2009–2019), she has been Chair of English PEN since 2021.