Chair
Alison Morrison
Treasurer
Nigel Williams
Trustees
Alastair Burtenshaw | Emmanuella Dekonor | Paula Gay | Alastair Giles | Harriet Hall | Sue Horner | Grace Kempster OBE | Alison Morrison | Ruth Petrie | Jessica Powell | Sara Wajid
Biographies
Alison Morrison(chair) entered the publishing industry via an Arts Council England traineeship. This took place at Jonathan Cape and Virago Press; since then, Alison has worked at Frederick Warne, Egmont Children’s Books and Walker Books.
Her career to date has seen her specialise in marketing, and she holds the Chartered Institute of Marketing's Diploma in Marketing. Alison is also the co-chair of the Diversity in Publishing Network , which she co-founded in order to help address issues of diversity within the industry.
Alison says 'I am delighted to be involved with the exceptional work of Booktrust.'
Alison is married with a young son, and lives in London.
Nigel Williams (treasurer) spent his working life in publishing. In 1967 he joined the finance department of Penguin; over the next 28 years he held various roles there, including Company Secretary and UK Finance Director. In 1995 he moved to Virgin Books Limited as Finance Director, where he worked until his retirement in 2004.
Alistair Burtenshaw, Group Exhibition Director, Retail Events, Reed Exhibitions Ltd, directs a group that includes The London Book Fair. London Book Fair is a highly respected international trade book fair (www.londonbookfair.co.uk) that has seen significant international growth in recent years and which is held at Earls Court in London on an annual basis every April.
Alistair graduated from business school in the UK and Italy with a BA Honours Degree and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Market Research Society.
Exhibition Director of London Book Fair from 2001 to 2005, Alistair is also a Board Director of The Book Trade Benevolent Society, a Management Board Member of the Financial Times / Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and a former Chair of the KPMG Publisher of the Year Award as well as being a former Executive Committee member of English PEN and a Founding Member of the Conference of Book Fair Directors.
Alistair is married with a daughter and lives in Berkshire.
Emmanuella Dekonor is a PR specialist and is currently working on her first novel.
Paula Gay is International Personnel Officer at the British Red Cross
Alastair Giles is an independent marketing consultant with a focus on ideas that help expand the general market for books and reading.
After a 15 year publishing career culminating in Group Marketing Director of HarperCollins Publishers, he left to set up an agency in 2002.
In addition to handling projects for both publishers and retailers, he has formulated successful media-driven generic book promotions such as The Richard and Judy Book Club and The Daily Mail Book Club. He is now working on transforming the annual British Book Awards into an event of similar status to the Brits, to which end a three-year television partnership has been agreed with Cactus TV and Channel 4.
He is also the secretary of the Book Marketing Society. Alastair Giles lives just outside Bath with his wife and three children, all of whom are charging happily through teenage life at blurring speed.
Harriet Hall has a first degree in Classics and is a qualified solicitor. She worked in a local practice for a couple of years until her first child was born. When she returned to work, she was employed as a legal editor, writing about changes in legislation for a publication used mainly by Citizens’ Advice Bureaux.
Later she moved on to legal policy work, and has a broad experience of how the law works in a number of areas including education, employment, consumer and social welfare law. She is currently on the Board of C & J Clark Ltd, the shoe company, as a non-executive director, which gives her a lot of commercial and corporate experience.
She is also a non-executive director of the South London and Maudsley Mental Health Foundation Trust. She is also a trustee of a small grant-giving charitable trust, which gives her an insight into fundraising strategies from the other side.
Sue Horner works at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority; she has a particular interest in English and the arts for ages 0-19.
Sue says, 'I am very pleased to support Booktrust in sharing the pleasure and excitement of reading.
'My current favourite book is A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb (Bloomsbury), perhaps because I’ve just had a holiday in Brazil.'
Grace Kempster is Director of Read On - Write Away
Ruth Petrie has worked in publishing for more than thirty years. In the late '70s and early '80s she was the editor of Spare Rib's reviews pages. She then spent 12 years at Virago, latterly as an Editorial Director. In recent years her freelance work has included Editorial/Production management at Serpent's Tail and at Guardian Books. Until recently, she spent two days a week at Canada House as the Literature Officer, promoting Canadian writers and writing in the UK. She was one of the original Orange Prize committee members; a prime mover of the international Feminist Bookfairs in the 1980s and early 90s; worked with other feminist publishers to encourage more black women into publishing. She is also publishing adviser to the Melanie Klein Trust.
Jessica Powell has worked as an editor, journalist, and translator in the U.S. and Europe, and until 2005 was the Director of Communications for the International Confederation of the Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC). She is currently Pan-European Communications Manager at Google in London, where she also continues to work as a freelance journalist. She recently published a book, Literary Paris.
Sara Wajid is a freelance writer focusing on cultural politics, heritage and race.
