The Progress 1000: London's most influential people 2017 - Literati: Authors

Juno Dawson

Author

Dawson, who dubs herself Queen of Teen, has published six novels for young adults and this year an adult memoir, The Gender Games. She is also the author of the acclaimed and amusing guide to growing up LGTBQ, This Book is Gay. In just five years, she has shot to prominence and advises those who would follow in her path to be young, to be gobby and to hustle.

Mitzi Angel

Publisher, Faber

Angel took over as publishing director at Faber two years ago, having spent the previous seven years in the US working for Jonathan Galassi. Tasked with introducing an exciting younger generation of writers to the esteemed publishing house, her acquisitions include Sally Rooney, the 25-year-old Irish author whose debut Conversations with Friends was one of this year’s big reads. She has also restructured the Faber team, abolishing the roles of fiction and non-fiction publisher.

Alan Bennett

Author and Playwright

He’s a national treasure who just keeps on giving, having most recently published another fat and hugely enjoyable tranche of diaries, covering the decade from 2005 to 2015. Let’s hope there’s more to come. And, from Nick Hytner’s film adaptation of The Lady in The Van to this year’s theatre production of Talking Heads, his back catalogue keeps on proving, like the man himself, beyond compare.

Neil Blair

Literary Agent

Ex-solicitor and former head of business at Warner Bros, Blair has represented JK Rowling since 2001, initially at the Christopher Little Literary Agency. In 2011, he set up his own agency, The Blair Partnership, and took his most lucrative client with him. Although the firm’s other clients include Frank Lampard and Pearl and Daisy Lowe, Rowling is the core business. Blair was the brains behind the hugely successful Harry Potter website, Pottermore — and can justly claim to take a pioneeringly new and strategic approach to representation. A keen footballer, Blair supports West Ham.

Venetia Butterfield

Publisher

Poached from HarperCollins, Butterfield is now publishing director at Viking, Portfolio and Penguin, where she has brought forward many new women writers like Emma Healey, as well as working with established names from Nick Hornby to Claire Tomalin. With three children of her own, she’s passionate about promoting the love of reading among the young and sits on the board of West London Free School. A close friend of the Camerons, she’s also appeared dashingly dressed in Vogue.

Rachel Cugnoni

Publisher

Having started in the business as a publicist for Cape, Cugnoni has risen to the top, since setting up the Random House sports imprint Yellow Jersey, and becoming publishing director of the paperback division Vintage. After Dan Franklin’s retirement as publisher at Cape two years ago, she has taken on cross-divisional responsibilities for one of the most distinguished lists and is reported to have become close to one of its starriest authors, Julian Barnes.

Rachel Cusk

Writer

Rachel Cusk provoked such a firestorm of controversy with her 2012 memoir Aftermath, about the break-up of her marriage, that she briefly fell silent as a novelist. Since then, however, she has published two books in a projected trilogy of connected stories, Outline (2014) and Transit (2016), that have been hailed as a stunning new departure for her, more oblique in plot than her previous work but still wonderfully telling and funny about the malaise of modern life.

James Daunt

Managing Director, Waterstones

The Cambridge-educated former ship’s purser and banker achieved fame with the establishment of London’s first boutique chain of eponymous bookshops, Daunts. In 2011, he was hired by Russian billionaire mogul Alexander Mamut to overhaul the larger chain that is Waterstones. Daunt believes that selling non-book items including coffee and stationery is key to survival in the face of Amazon: Waterstones continues to open new branches.

Caleb Femi

Poet and Filmmaker

At 26, Caleb Femi is the new Young People’s Laureate for London. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, St Paul’s, the Royal Society of Literature and the Guardian. He has won poetry slams, leads workshops and is working on a debut pamphlet. He grew up in Peckham after coming to London from Nigeria aged seven. Until 2014, he taught English in Tottenham. Emphasising that poetry, no longer confined to the page, is much more accessible than it used to be, he is particularly concerned with breaking down gender stereotypes.

Carol Ann Duffy

Poet Laureate

The nation’s first female and openly bisexual poet laureate, Dame Carol Ann Duffy, who has held the post since 2009, has been busy this year, like everyone else, delving into the murky world of politics. First came her play, My Country: A Work in Progress, a staged production using real-life testimonials in response to Brexit — which was almost universally panned by the critics — then Campaign, a poem about the prime minister after the general election.

Nicky Dunne

Heywood Hill bookseller

Has taken the classy old-fashioned Mayfair bookstore into a new, profitable era by offering lots of ritzy extra services, from curated book lists and personalised antiquarian libraries to monthly parcels, the literary equivalent of Abel and Cole. He also arranges readings from his A-list actor friends in the shop’s charmingly antiquated interior, where Nancy Mitford once tended the till. Known for its aristocratic customer base, it’s no surprise that the Queen is a fan and has awarded the shop a royal warrant.

Jonny Geller

Joint chief executive, Curtis Brown

A 360-degree super-agent who represents big “sleb” authors including John le Carré, David Nicholls and William Boyd. A darling of the glitterati, he’s constantly winning industry awards and has become a keen spotter of the “high-concept” novel. He gave a TEDx talk this year on “What Makes A Bestseller?” — and following Ed Victor’s death, Curtis Brown took over his list of authors, Geller promising to protect Ed Victor’s legacy. A keen tweeter with a big following, he too is no fan of President Trump.

Paula Hawkins

Novelist

Hawkins took a big risk this year when in May she published her follow-up to her 2015 huge bestseller, The Girl on the Train. Instead of sticking closely to the successful template, she chose to write an ambitious, multi-voice novel, Into The Water, about mistaken memories and nefarious goings-on in a Northumberland town, where women have drowned in a river once used for witch trials. The novel is already scheduled for filming but, although it sold 100,000 hardback copies in its first two months, it did not dominate the bestseller lists quite as much as might have been expected. Will the paperback put that right?

Bettany Hughes

Historian and Broadcaster

Hughes has presented more than 50 broadcast documentaries on many aspects of ancient and medieval history as well as pursuing a distinguished academic career and she has done much to bring the role of women in history to the fore, as well as promoting the teaching of Latin and Greek. Her books include Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore and, most recently, her immensely popular Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, and she is currently making a film about the goddess Aphrodite.

Nadiya Hussain

TV star and Author

Nadiya Hussain, from a British Bangladeshi family in Luton, rose to fame two years ago in the sixth series of The Great British Bake-Off. Her immense popularity has challenged stereotypes about the Muslim community and she has remained hyper-active in the media ever since. Her books so far include Nadiya’s Kitchen, a children’s book called Bake Me a Story, and a series of contemporary women’s fiction for Harlequin, beginning this year with The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters, about a dysfunctional but lovable second-generation Bangladeshi family.

Shappi Khorsandi

Author and Comedian

Iranian-born, Khorsandi came to London with her family after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Last year, she became president of the British Humanist Association. Her memoir, A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, was published in 2009, and a novel, Nina is not OK, about an alcoholic teenager, last year. She ruffled feathers earlier this year when she withdrew the novel from the longlist for the inaugural Jhalak prize, open only to writers of colour, because she “felt like my skin colour was up for an award rather than my book”.

John le Carré

Author

Le Carré’s stature continues to grow — and, aged 85, he is still writing. Responding to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography, he told his own version of his story last year in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, for a readership that has grown larger than ever, following the acclaimed TV adaptation of The Night Manager. Just out is the first George Smiley novel for 25 years, A Legacy of Spies, which looks back to the Cold War and its great predecessors, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Ian McEwan

Author

McEwan continues to publish highly readable novels, roughly one every two years, his most recent being Nutshell, which is narrated by a baby in the womb, a highly sophisticated Hamlet-like character who listens in on his mother and her lover plotting to kill his father: reviews were mixed. His previous novel The Children’s Act has been made into a film directed by Richard Eyre, with Emma Thompson as the family law judge. McEwan is married to fellow novelist Annalena McAfee, whose latest work of fiction is Hame.

Dan Mucha

UK Director of Books at Amazon

With his previous experience in business and digital development at MSNBC, not to mention a stint developing Amazon’s Kindle content, Mucha, who is originally from California, is perfectly poised to steer Amazon Books through choppy waters as the e-tailers and retailers continue to battle it out. He was one of the judges on the Oscar’s Book Prize 2016.

Douglas Murray

Author

Earlier this year, the Right-wing historian, political commentator and founder of the Centre for Social Cohesion published his incendiary new book, The Strange Death of Europe, about why Europe is, as he puts it, committing suicide. An overt critic of Islam and of mass migration into Europe, Murray believes that collective guilt about our own past together with a decline in both birth rates and Christianity are all to blame. He is a prolific debater and tweeter, and his book remains a bestseller.

Gail Rebuck

Chair, Penguin Random House

Baroness Rebuck was made a Labour life peer and remains the grande dame of British publishing, having relinquished her chief executive’s role at Random House after the Penguin merger to become chairman. A long-time champion of women writers, from Susie Orbach to EL James, the widow of the late polling guru Lord Gould is also the proud mother of Camden Council leader Georgia Gould and tech-preneur Grace Gould.

Andrew Roberts

Historian

As well known for his bulging book of conservative-minded contacts as for his biographies of politicians and statesmen, Roberts is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Married to global CEO of Brunswick PR Susan Gilchrist, Roberts has an impressive tracklist of major publications, including The Storm of War and Napoleon the Great, but finds time to contribute a good deal of highly effective polemically Right-wing journalism to the papers, too.

JK Rowling

Novelist

JK Rowling remains as busy as ever. Filming started this summer on the follow-up to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, destined ultimately to become a five-part series. She confirmed on Twitter that Robert Galbraith’s fourth Cormoran Strike crime thriller is titled Lethal White - the first and second were adapted for a BBC series - and it has been announced that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will open on Broadway next spring. Meanwhile, she has been active on social media, fiercely opposing Brexit and ridiculing Donald Trump. Worth an estimated £650 million, her only rival as the most charitable celebrity is Sir Elton John.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Author

Dashing historian who has written vividly about Russian history, from Catherine the Great to Stalin and the Romanovs. He also has a knack for producing popular Russian-themed thriller-love stories, this year’s treat being Red Sky at Noon. Television loves him, with almost all his books having been or about to be made into films or TV mini-series. Married to novelist Santa, he is an indefatigable tweeter and socialite.

Zadie Smith

Author

Zadie Smith won all the prizes with her debut novel White Teeth, back in 2000, when she was just 25. She later suggested this early success was difficult to live up to — but she is on peak form in her latest novel, Swing Time, the story of two girls who meet at a tap-dance class, rated by many critics as her best yet. Smith, who teaches fiction at NYU, divides her time between Queen’s Park and New York City.

Edward St Aubyn

Novelist

St Aubyn’s great work is his Patrick Melrose quintet, which he completed in 2012. It is currently being adapted by Sky Atlantic into a five-part TV series promisingly starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Post-Melrose, St Aubyn has produced a scathing satire on the absurdity of literary prizes, Lost for Words — and this autumn he publishes Dunbar, his contribution to the Hogarth series rewriting Shakespeare. Dunbar is a modern King Lear, an ageing media mogul, a little like a Canadian-born Rupert Murdoch, who recklessly cedes his company to his two evil older daughters, to the dismay of his youngest.

Bruno Vincent

Author

Bruno Vincent was a bookseller and editor before he was an author: he knows what sells. Do Ants Have Arseholes? was his first number one hit. After the huge success of Michael Joseph’s Ladybird book spoofs a couple of years ago, he took on the job of doing the same for Enid Blyton. It’s a format that proves to have almost unlimited scope: Five on Brexit Island, Five Give Up the Booze, Five Go Gluten-Free have all sold like hot cakes. Will the upcoming Five Get On the Property Ladder prove more of a challenge?

David Walliams

Children’s Author

The multi-talented actor has morphed from comic genius to super-successful children’s author, with his stories for eight- to 12-year-olds — mostly about bullied pre-pubescents — topping the children’s bestseller lists, month in, month out. He been favourably compared to Roald Dahl and Sales are soaring, thanks to Walliams’s original writing and tireless self-promotion, although most of his instagrams feature dog Bert — or Mum.

Tom Weldon

Chief Executive, Penguin Random House UK

Runs the British arm of the world’s biggest publishing house, following the merger of Penguin and Random, dubbed Randy Penguin, but still keeps his hand in editing manuscripts. Weldon grew up in London, studied history at Oxford, then joined Macmillan as a graduate trainee. It was love at first print; the rest is history. He’s admitted to being driven by a passion for gambling and betting, whether on horses, dogs or books. It’s all about taking risks.

Joe Wicks

Fitness Coach and Author

Joe Wicks’s first cookbook, Lean in 15, sold an extraordinary 900,000 copies and his deft use of social media has made him an icon whose promise of fitness in four weeks of 15 minutes of high intensity exercise a day, combined with simple diet improvements, has transfixed millions of fans, not least because of his readiness to show exactly how it has worked for him.