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Kishani Widyaratna
Publishing director Fourth Estate
Widyaratna is the reigning British Book Awards Editor of the Year for a 2023 that saw her publishing the likes of Yomi Adegoke’s ( 1) The List and Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually. Widyaratna may make Nibbies history and win the gong two years on the trot, as her 2024 has arguably been even stronger, led by Asako Yuzuki’s all-conquering Butter, translated by Polly Barton. The title, aided by Emma Pidsley’s eye-catching design, is HarperCollins’ bestselling book originally published this year and has been buoyed by unstinting support from indie booksellers and Waterstones, with the chain naming it its Book of the Year.
That is not just because women make up the majority of staff across publishing’s editorial departments, though there is certainly a huge gender split: we identified 682 individual editors across the TCM titles, 79% of whom were women. But on a pure sales basis, female editors far outpaced their male counterparts, with authors for the average woman editor in our data gener- ating 55,238 unit sales through BookScan; the median for the average male editor was 11,000 fewer copies.
W
ith a dozen editors across the top 30, and four of the first five, Penguin Random House shows a clean pair of heels to the rest of the
publishing pack. Perhaps no surprise as PRH has had an incredibly strong 2024 at the upper echelons of the charts: of the 50 bestsell- ing titles released since 1st January, PRH has published 24 of them. It has done extremely well at “posh bingo”, sweeping the big three UK-based awards (the Booker, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Baillie Gifford Prize). As the sales portion of the formula is based
on a top 5,000 chart, it inevitably favours bigger players. Every house having multiple entries is a conglomerate, with HarperCollins second on four spots, Hachette notching three places, while Pan Macmillan and Bloomsbury sport two apiece. Four of the 30 hail from indies: David Fickling Books’ managing and publishing director Liz Cross (responsible for much of Nibbie Illustrator of the Year Jamie Smart’s 2024 output); Faber publisher Alex Bowler (Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk’s editor); Souvenir Press editorial director Cindy Chan (who brought Murdle to the Profile imprint); and Granta associate publishing director Laura Barber, who guided Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann’s Kairos to International Booker glory. Before sinking our teeth into the finer detail
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of the list, we should step back and acknowledge that editors are, of course, just a part of a team, and the success of a book is also down to the marketers, publicists, sales reps, designers, production managers and senior staff who sign
5 Clara Farmer
Associate publishing director
Chatto Penguin Random House Editor score
21
6 Natasha Bardon
Publisher HarperVoyager HarperCollins
Editor score 19
7
Federico Andornino
Executive publisher Sceptre Hachette
Editor score 18
8
Alexis Kirschbaum Head
Bloomsbury Trade Bloomsbury
Editor score 17
9 Maria Rejt
Publisher Mantle Pan Macmillan
Editor score 17
10 Rebekah West
Editor Piatkus Fiction Hachette
Editor score 17 39
DARREN GERRISH
Features
Editor 30
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