James Daunt

Last updated

James Daunt

CBE
Born
Achilles James Daunt

(1963-10-18) 18 October 1963 (age 60)
NationalityBritish
Education Sherborne School
Alma mater Pembroke College, Cambridge University
Occupation(s)Managing Director, Waterstones
Known forFounder, Daunt Books
SpouseKaty Steward
Children2 daughters
Parent(s) Sir Timothy Daunt
Patricia Susan Knight
Relatives Achilles Daunt (great-great grandfather)

Achilles James Daunt CBE (born 18 October 1963) 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". [1] [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Achilles James Daunt [3] was born on 18 October 1963, [4] the son of the diplomat Sir Timothy Daunt and his wife Patricia Susan Knight.

He was educated at Sherborne School, before reading history at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. [5]

Career

His first job was as a purser with Carnival Cruise Lines. [4]

After working in the US as a banker for JP Morgan between 1985 and 1988, he founded Daunt Books in 1990, [6] a chain of six bookshops in London. [2]

In May 2011, he was appointed managing director of Waterstones by the company's new owner, the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. [7] The pair were listed at fourth place in a 2011 Guardian list of the top 100 people in the British books industry. [8]

Daunt was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. [9] [10]

In June 2019, he became the CEO of the US bookshop chain Barnes & Noble, [11] acquired by Waterstones' parent, Elliott Advisors (UK) for $683m. [12]

Daunt was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to publishing. [13]

Personal life

He is married to Katy Steward, a professional in the health sector. They have two daughters, Molly and Eliza, and live in a 4-storey house in Hampstead. [14] [15] They have a second house in Beccles, Suffolk, and a third on the Isle of Jura in Scotland. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barnes & Noble</span> American bookseller and retailer

Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of October 2023, the company operates 592 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foyles</span> English bookstore chain

Waterstones is a British book retailer that operates 311 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and also other nearby countries. As of February 2014, it employs around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe. An average-sized Waterstones shop sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products.

Blackwell UK, also known as Blackwell's and Blackwell Group, is a British academic book retailer and library supply service owned by Waterstones. It was founded in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, after whom the chain is named, on Broad Street, Oxford. The brand now has a chain of 18 shops, and an accounts and library supply service. It employs around 1000 staff in its divisions.

The Friday Project was a London-based independent publishing house founded by Paul Carr and Clare Christian in June 2004. It evolved out of The Friday Thing, an Internet newsletter taking an offbeat look at the week's politics, media activities and general current events, originally written together with Charlie Skelton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottakar's</span>

Ottakar's was a chain of bookshops in the United Kingdom founded in 1987 by James Heneage. Following a takeover by the HMV Group in 2006, the chain was merged into the Waterstone's brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bookselling</span> Business of selling and dealing with books

Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dillons the Bookstore</span>

Dillons was a British bookseller founded in 1936, named after its founder and owner Una Dillon. Originally based in Bloomsbury in London, the company expanded under subsequent owners Pentos in the 1980s into a bookselling chain across the United Kingdom. In 1995 Pentos went into receivership and sold Dillons to Thorn EMI, which immediately closed 40 of the 140 Dillons bookstore locations. Of the remaining 100 stores, most kept the name Dillons, while the remainder were Hatchards and Hodges Figgis. Within Thorn EMI, Dillons was placed in the HMV Group, which had been a division of Thorn EMI since 1986. EMI demerged from Thorn in August 1996, and Dillons-HMV remained an EMI holding. Dillons was subsumed under rival chain Waterstones' branding in 1999, at which point the brand ceased to exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hodges Figgis</span> Bookshop in Dublin, Ireland

Hodges Figgis is a long-operating bookshop in central Dublin, Ireland. Founded in 1768, it is probably the third-oldest functioning bookstore in the world, after the Livraria Bertrand of Lisbon (1732) and Pennsylvania's Moravian Book Shop (1745). It was moved and expanded numerous times, and assumed its current form, at 56-58 Dawson Street, in 1992, operating continuously over three storeys-over-basement since then. It is mentioned in James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses, at the time of which it would have been situated at 104 Grafton Street, and the novel Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, and in other writings. Since 2011, it has been owned and operated by Waterstones, who regards it as an integral bookstore and provides it with considerable autonomy. It celebrated its 250th anniversary with the publication of an anthology of modern Irish writing with 250 contributors.

The Waterstones Children's Book Prize is an annual award given to a work of children's literature published during the previous year. First awarded in 2005, the purpose of the prize is "to uncover hidden talent in children's writing" and is therefore open only to authors who have published no more than two or three books, depending on which category they are in. The prize is awarded by British book retailer Waterstones.

Borders (UK) Ltd., also known as Borders & Books etc., was established as a Borders Group subsidiary in 1998, and in 2007 became independent of the US parent company. At its peak after separation from the US parent, it traded from its 41 Borders and 28 BOOKS etc. shops with over one million square feet of retail space, taking around 8% of the retail bookselling market. In 2008 and 2009 the store numbers were reduced before the collapse of the chain. They also operated one single branch in Ireland, but closed this early in 2009. On 26 November 2009 it was announced that Borders (UK) had gone into administration. All stores closed on 24 December 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernardine Evaristo</span> British author and academic (born 1959)

Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daunt Books</span> British bookstore chain

Daunt Books is an independent chain of bookshops in England, founded in 1990 by James Daunt. It originally specialised in travel books. In 2010, it began publishing. James Daunt later became the managing director of Waterstones and the US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Mamut</span> Russian billionaire businessman

Alexander Leonidovich Mamut also spelled Aleksandr, is a Russian billionaire, lawyer, banker and investor. He was until 2020 a co-owner of Rambler Group. He is an Israeli citizen.

<i>The Age of Innocence</i> (Hamilton book)

The Age of Innocence is a 1995 photography and poetry book by David Hamilton. The book contains images of early-teen girls, often nude, accompanied by lyrical poetry. Images are in a boudoir setting and photographed mainly in colour using a soft-focus filter, with some shots in black-and-white.

James Heneage is a British historical fiction writer, and the co-founder of the Ottakar’s bookshop chain and the Chalke Valley History Festival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrice Lawrence</span> British writer and journalist

Patrice Lawrence MBE, FRSL is a British writer and journalist, who has published fiction both for adults and children. Her writing has won awards including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Older Children and The Bookseller YA Book Prize. In 2021, she won the Jhalak Prize's inaugural children's and young adult category for her book Eight Pieces of Silva (2020).

Russian money in London is the flow of capital from Russia to the United Kingdom since the dissolution of the Soviet Union which has had an noticeable impacted the London economy. Colloquially the impact of the capital flow is referred to as "Londongrad" and "Moscow-on-Thames".

References

  1. "James Daunt: the man who saved Waterstones". Evening Standard. London. 10 December 2014. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  2. 1 2 Correspondent, Callum Jones, US Business. "James Daunt: The man who wrote the book on the daunting task of taking on Amazon". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 9 November 2021.{{cite news}}: |first= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. "Daunt Books Limited". Companies House. Retrieved 19 November 2015.
  4. 1 2 "Interview" by Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times Business Section, 22 December 2013, p. 6.
  5. "Pembroke Gazette 2012" (PDF). Pembroke College. p. 120. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 November 2015. Retrieved 19 November 2015.
  6. Kate Kellaway, "James Daunt: 'I don't recognise that books are dead'", The Guardian , 3 June 2011.
  7. James Hall, "James Daunt parachuted in to run Waterstone's", The Daily Telegraph , 20 May 2011.
  8. Books Power 100: James Daunt and Alexander Mamut | No 4, The Guardian, 24 September 2011.
  9. Natasha Onwuemezi, "Rankin, McDermid and Levy named new RSL fellows", The Bookseller , 7 June 2017.
  10. "Current RSL Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 10 June 2017.
  11. Alexandra Alter and Tiffany Hsu, "Barnes & Noble Is Sold to Hedge Fund After a Tumultuous Year'", New York Times , 7 June 2019.
  12. "Elliott to buy Barnes & Noble; Daunt will run both chains | The Bookseller". thebookseller.com. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  13. "No. 63714". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 June 2022. p. B9.
  14. Eyre, Hermione (11 December 2014). "James Daunt: the man who saved Waterstones". Evening Standard . London. Retrieved 19 November 2015.
  15. 1 2 Anthony, Andrew (27 May 2012). "James Daunt: the bibliophile who means business". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 November 2015.
Business positions
Preceded by Managing Director of Waterstones
May 2011 -
Succeeded by
Incumbent