The winner of the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize has been announced!

Posted on May 11, 2012 in Uncategorized

Congratulations to Rukhsana Yasmin, a physicist turned publisher, who was named the winner of the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize 2012 after just five years in the trade.

We had a wonderful evening at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon with the ceremony packed with publishers, young and old as the prize winner was announced. Matthew Hollis, Editor at Faber & Faber and prize-winning author, who was a good friend and colleague of Kim Scott Walwyn, awarded Rukhsana with her Prize of £1000 sponsored by the Society of Young Publishers and a two-day course of her choice, courtesy of the Publishing Training Centre.

After obtaining a Masters in Physics from the University of Surrey and undertaking numerous media jobs, Rukhsana made the transition to book publishing in 2007 when she was accepted as a trainee on the Arts Council’s Diversity in Publishing Scheme at Saqi Books. Having learnt the ropes there, in 2009 she secured an Assistant Editor’s position at Profile Books, before being promoted to Editor in 2010. The first title she acquired, In The Place of Justice by Wilbert Rideau, was shortlisted for the Golden Dagger and won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In February, Rukhsana returned to where she started out, taking on the role of Commissioning Editor for Saqi’s newly launched imprint The Westbourne Press and fiction imprint Telegram Books. Here her ambition is to publish extraordinary life stories from across the world and titles that make science accessible to everyone. Her perseverance in carving out a publishing career, clear passion for the books she commissions, and the potential she has to make a difference in the industry over the next decade, made her this year’s judges’ choice.

Rukhsana joins an impressive list of Prize alumni including: last year’s winner Kay Peddle, Editor at the Bodley Head; Kathy Rooney, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Publishing; Clare Alexander, Literary Agent at Aitken Alexander Associates; Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillan; Penelope Hoare, Deputy Managing Director at Chatto & Windus (although now semi-retired); and the inaugural winner Lynette Owen OBE, Copyright Director of Pearson Education.

Last year’s winner Kay Peddle, who joined the judging panel this year, commented:
‘It’s been an honour to be a judge for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize. The applicants were all outstanding and it was a near-impossible decision to make, but Rukhsana Yasmin stood out. Her passion, resilience, perseverance, determination and impeccable literary taste mark her as a publisher with a brilliant future.’

The Prize was founded in honour of Kim Scott Walwyn, a Publishing Director at Oxford University Press, who died in 2002 at the age of 45. She was an outstanding editor and a generous and inspirational manager whose career was widely recognised and celebrated during her life. The Prize, which has been awarded seven times, is open to any woman who has worked in publishing in the UK for up to seven years. It is managed by Booktrust and sponsored by the SYP and PTC.

Rukhsana fought off strong competition from the 2012 shortlist, who each received a one-day training course at the PTC. They were:
•    Donna Condon – Senior Commissioning Fiction Editor, Piatkus – Little, Brown
•    Eleanor Crawforth – Editor / Sales and Marketing Manager, Carcanet Press
•    Bethan Jones – Head of Yellow Jersey Press / Crime Fiction and Senior Publicity Manager, Chatto and Windus, Harvill Secker and Square Peg – Random House

Congratulations to Rukhsana and the shortlisted candidates, your achievements are inspiring and we were happy to be there and cheer you all on!