Industry Insights for Novelists

Yassine Belkacemi (pictured) is Editorial Director at John Murray Publishing Group where he commissions literary fiction and non-fiction across the John Murray imprint and publishes literary crime and thriller on the Baskerville list. The bestselling and prize-winning authors he publishes include the #1 Sunday Times bestseller Mick Herron, the Sunday Times bestseller Frankie Boyle, Jiaming Tang, Kaoru Takamura, James Wolff, Djamel White, Alan Parks, Calla Henkel and more.

Julia Bird is a highly experienced poetry programmer who has worked for organisations including the Poetry School and The Poetry Society. As a freelancer, she’s worked for literary development agencies, festivals, publishers and magazines, and in arts, university and healthcare settings. Through her company Jaybird Live Literature she has produced eight Arts Council England-funded touring poetry shows; and she is the author or co-author of six poetry collections. 

Sam Copeland was shortlisted for Literary Agent of the Year at the 2020 and 2021 British Book Awards and selected for the Bookseller’s Most Influential People in Publishing in 2020. He joined RCW Literary Agency in 2006 and became a director in 2016. He has an extremely diverse list of award-winning and bestselling authors, representing writers of both literary and commercial fiction and all genres (including book group, upmarket fiction, crime and thrillers, speculative fiction and historical fiction – although he isn’t looking at SF and fantasy at the moment), children’s and YA, and a smattering of quality non-fiction, and is always open to submissions of the highest standard. He is excited by debuts! 

Lynn Gaspard (pictured) is a British Lebanese publisher, cultural advocate and the managing director of Saqi Books, an independent publishing house renowned for championing voices from the Middle East and beyond. A passionate advocate for literary freedom, Lynn has spoken publicly on issues of censorship and representation, including for Index on Censorship’s #BannedBooksWeek and on NPR and the BBC. A former trustee of the Shubbak Festival and member of English PEN’s Writers in Translation committee, she is the editor of Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic (a Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year) and was shortlisted for the Independent Publishers Guild’s Young Publisher of the Year Award. 

Grace Murray was born in 2003 and grew up in Norwich. She has recently graduated from Edinburgh University, where she read English Literature and found time to write between her studies and two part-time jobs. Her short fiction has been published in The London Magazine. 

Blank Canvas was written over the course of a year as part of WriteNow, Penguin Random House’s flagship mentorship scheme for emerging talent. Grace Murray won one of nine places on the scheme on the exceptional strength of her writing, selected from a pool of over 1,300 applicants. 

Andrew McMillan is the author of three previous poetry collections, a novel and the co-editor of the anthology 100 Queer Poems. His work has won the Guardian First Book Award, the only poetry collection to ever do so, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Polari Prize and a Northern Writers’ Award, amongst others.  He has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, The Forward Prizes and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson has been a literary critic and journalist for two decades. She currently writes for the Spectator, the Financial Times, Prospect, the London Evening Standard, the Times Literary Supplement and many others. She writes about culture and lifestyle and is happy to conduct interviews on almost any subject. 

Joe Sedgwick (pictured) has supported writers professionally for over a decade. He began work at The Literary Consultancy as a paid intern in 2015 and now works running their editorial service division as Head of Writing Services. He has a Publishing MA from Kingston University, and has been on the Board of Trustees at Spread the Word. He also began work as a Literary Agent at Seventh Agency in 2024 and is actively looking for non-fiction and literary fiction from global voices and writers who are under-represented in the UK publishing industry.