Honouring publishing’s outstanding women

Booktrust today announced the shortlist for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize which honours outstanding achievements by women in publishing. The shortlisted women are:

Lennie Goodings, Publisher of Virago Press

Kathy Rooney, Managing Director, Bloomsbury Information Ltd

Alison Samuels, Publishing Director, Chatto and Windus

The winner, who will receive a cheque for £3,000, will be announced at a ceremony at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on 17 June.

Kate Jury, Chair of the committee, commented:
‘Now in its fifth year, the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize continues to attract women of the highest calibre, and we are proud that the on this year’s shortlist we have three women who have helped to shape and sustain the success of some of the most prestigious publishers in the UK.’

Previous winners of the prestigious prize include Annette Thomas, then Managing Director of Nature Publishing who later became CEO of Macmillan, and Lynette Owen, Copyright Director of Pearson Education Ltd who was recently awarded an OBE.
Last year the prize was awarded to the literary agent Clare Alexander.

The prize was founded in honour of Kim Scott Walwyn, (pic above), a Publishing Director at Oxford University Press who died in 2002 at the age of 45.
She was an outstanding editor and generous and inspirational manager whose career was widely recognised and celebrated during her life.

The prize committee is Professor Dame Gillian Beer DBE, FBA, FRSL (King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge); Catherine Clarke (Literary Agent, Felicity Bryan Agency); Denise Johnstone-Burt (Publisher at Walker Books); Kate Jury (student, Landscape Architecture), Hermione Lee CBE (biographer, English Literature professor and President of Wolfson College Oxford), Fiona Maddocks (Chief Music Critic, The Observer); Sarah O’Brien (Legal worker); and Francine Stock (novelist and broadcaster).

Shortlist

Lennie Goodings

Lennie Goodings has been the Publisher of Virago Press since 1996. She is the editor of, among others, Sarah Dunant, Gillian Slovo, Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Marilynne Robinson, Shirley Hazzard, Margaret Atwood, Josephine Hart, Maya Angelou, Frances Osborne, Joan Bakewell, Shirley Williams and Lisa Appignanesi.
She oversaw the publicity and marketing for Virago for ten years, became the Editorial Director in the early 1990s, and has been Editorial Director and Publisher since 1996 when she and the Virago Directors sold the company to Little, Brown/Time Warner. Under her auspices, the Virago imprint has flourished, publishing high-profile authors and award-winning books. It 2008 it achieved a gross turnover of £3.8 million.

Lennie was part of Book Action for Nuclear Disarmament and one of the founders of the Feminist Book Fair in the 1980s, and today is on the Board of English PEN. She has written a children’s book, published by Macmillan. She is married, with two teenage children.

Kathy Rooney
Kathy Rooney began her career as an editor of the Collins German Dictionary with William Collins and Sons Ltd. After working at Quarto and Longman, she joined Bloomsbury in 1987. Her major reference projects include Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary, which now powers the spell-check in MS Word, Macmillan English Dictionary (2002), BUSINESS – The Ultimate Resource (2002) which was published in eight languages and QFinance, an information portal for finance professionals.
From 2005-8 Rooney was in charge of Bloomsbury’s German subsidiary, Berlin Verlag, which publishes fiction, non-fiction and children’s books in hardback and paperback. Rooney is currently a director of Bloomsbury PLC.
Her current long-term role is to establish Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in Doha, Qatar. This is Bloomsbury’s newest venture, a publishing and literacy project for the Qatar Foundation.

Alison Samuel
Alison Samuel has been Publishing Director at Chatto and Windus since January 1998.
From 1977-1985 Alison worked as a Freelance editor, mainly for Secker & Warburg, but also reading for Book Clubs and editing for a range of publishers. During this time she edited Life and Times of Michael K by J.M.Cotezee which won the Booker Prize in 1983. In 1985 she joined Chatto and Windus as a Senior Editor and became Managing Editor and Director in 1997.
As Publishing Director, her authors currently include Anita Desai (Fasting, Feasting shortlisted for the Booker 1999), Margaret Forster, Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha), Mary Lawson, Nigella Lawson, David Malouf, Blake Morrison, Amos Oz, Andrew Solomon (Noonday Demon), D.J.Taylor, Anne Tyler and many others. She is married with two grown-up sons.