We are so excited to announce the following speakers at our 2019 Autumn Oxford Conference, with more to be announced in the next few weeks. Watch this space!
Hannah Telfer
@HTelfer1
Managing Director of Audiences & Audio, Penguin; Trustee for the Reading Agency; and Mentor with Creative Access.
A love of reading is what first got me into publishing, but it’s the people and culture which have kept me hooked ever since. As Managing Director for Audiences & Audio – looking after audiobooks, audience insight and engagement, and Penguin Live – I love working out how best to help our teams find new and valuable ways to bring authors, readers and listeners together. I’m also a trustee of The Reading Agency and a mentor with Creative Access, and find it incredibly rewarding to work with the wider industry to ensure books continue to work their magic and help change lives.
Claire Fenby
@claire_fenby
Claire Fenby works in Digital Marketing and Publicity at HarperCollins publishers and was instrumental in the launch of the company’s new digital division One More Chapter in July. Claire has a keen interest in creative content and community engagement as well as championing diversity in commercial publishing. Alongside working in the industry, Claire is an active online creator on YouTube and Instagram, where she posts bookish lifestyle content, with a combined following of 22k+. Claire has an MA in Literature from the University of York and previously worked as a bookseller at Waterstones.
Ana McLaughlin
@Anabooks
Ana McLaughlin has worked in publicity for nearly twenty years, both freelance and in-house at publishers including Random House, Kyle Books, and Michael O’Mara. She has delivered campaigns on fiction, non-fiction, humour, celebrity, and children’s titles, including bestsellers ranging from Sir Roger Moore’s autobiography to Where’s the Meerkat? Ana has worked with brands including Wagamama, Morgan cars, and Green & Black’s Chocolate. She is currently job-sharing the role of Deputy Publicity Director at Quercus. She edits poetry anthologies under her maiden name, Ana Sampson, including She is Fierce (Macmillan) and spends too much time on social media.
Leanne MacDuff
@leannemacduff
Leanne MacDuff has spent the last eight years in business, marketing, and communication roles. With her broad range of skills and marketing experience and a passion for books and coffee, she now works as a social media manager for the customer audience team of OUP Academic in Oxford for the past two years. Her role is varied and widely spread from working with senior marketers to optimize seasonal campaign plans across the academic business, to launching and looking after academic social media channels with the academic team, leading in and developing new ideas to connect with audiences through organic and paid social media.
Sanne Vliegenthart
@booksandquills
Sanne Vliegenthart has built her career online, through her YouTube channel booksandquills, with over180,000 subscribers, her role as Social Media Producer for Penguin Random House UK working on Penguin Platform, and now as a freelance digital producer, content creator and public speaker.
Sam Missingham
@samatlounge @empoweredauthor
Sam Missingham is a self-confessed publishing and books nerd. She recently launched The Empowered Author, a book marketing membership service for authors. She also works as a consultant for several publishers. Prior to this she worked at HarperCollins UK for 4 years as head of audience development where she ran large-scale marketing campaigns that connected books and authors with readers. Previous to HarperCollins she worked at the industry trade magazine, The Bookseller, running conferences, awards, marketing where she was also co-founder of FutureBook.
She has won several book marketing awards, been shortlisted for the Digital Book World commentator of the year, runner-up for the Pandora award for sustained contribution to publishing. She speaks regularly about book marketing and publishing strategies around the world, loves speaking to students and mentoring people entering publishing.
Gift Ajimokun
@Giftee2000
Gift started at Penguin Random House at 19 years old developing the work experience programme which randomly selects candidates to remove bias. Six months into her role Gift founded ‘Colour[full]’ PRH’s first internal network for BAME employees, currently with 90 members. Work Gift has done with Colour[full] throughout the past year includes, organised four talks promoting BAME authors, provided consultation on the ‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama book campaign, and curating a day-long workshop for women of colour from deprived areas of Birmingham and surrounding areas. Colour[full] has also since been shortlisted for the ‘ENEI network of the year 2019’ and Gift has been listed at Top 10 BAME workplace hero by Investing with Ethnicity.
Suzy Astbury
@suzy_a @inspiredjobs
Suzy Astbury is Managing Director of Inspired Search & Selection, the publishing recruitment experts. She started her career in publishing and worked in sales, marketing and latterly rights. Suzy then moved into publishing recruitment and moved to Inspired Selection in 2010. Suzy now runs and owns the business and is hugely proud to be celebrating Inspired turning 20 this year!
Eliza Kavanagh
As Communications Manager, Eliza is responsible for the Publishers Association’s social media, website, newsletters and events, managing effective communications with its 135+ publisher members. With previous roles including Marketing & Conference Coordinator at The London Book Fair and Editor at Renbro Publishing, her career has taken her from freelance work for an independent publisher in Australia to working at the heart of the UK publishing industry, delivering national campaigns like Love Audio Week, the Guide to the Best New Kids Books, and Work in Publishing Week.
Jasmine Denholm
@jassyfizzlexx
Jasmine works as a Rights and Sales Assistant at David Fickling Books, an independent publisher in Oxford. Before starting there in 2017, she was a bookseller at an independent bookshop in Shropshire during which time she was shortlisted for Young Retailer of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards (Nibbies) and was a Bookseller Rising Star 2016.
Fran Roberts
@CatwomanFran
Fran (she/her) is Content and Community Executive at The London Book Fair and Marketing Director at 3 of Cups Press. With a BA from Bath Spa University in Creative Writing, Fran is mostly found bending words to her will, and has done marketing and publicity for the likes of I.B.Tauris, DK and Dodo Ink. When not working on books, Fran can be found indulging in her love of history and London, or training for her second marathon. Her natural habitat is a good brunch spot.
Ana Arêde
@anarede
Ana Arêde is the Publisher for the Story Makers Press. She has a background in education publishing and is passionate about children’s voice and literature. Story Makers Press is a groundbreaking project dedicated to working with young people to create stories that matter to them, making sure that they feel seen, heard and represented. The Press uses drama and storytelling with children to help them explore different narratives, which it then aims to transform into engaging fiction books.
Nikul Patel
Nikul is a Senior Publisher at Oxford University Press, working on the fully Open Access journal programme. He has also worked in editorial at Taylor & Francis and as a Digital Content Controller at OUP. Nikul has studied English literature at the University of Plymouth (BA Hons) before completing an MA in Publishing from Oxford Brookes University.
Emma Bradshaw
@EmmaCBradshaw
Emma Bradshaw began her career as a bookseller at Ottakar’s in Bromley before moving to the publicity department at HarperCollins Children’s Books. She joined the Bloomsbury team in 2007, where she worked for almost 11 years as Senior Publicity Manager. While there she was responsible for campaigns for authors including Sarah J Maas, Sarah Crossan, Katherine Rundell, and Greg James and Chris Smith. In July 2018 Emma took up her current role as Head of Campaigns at the Booksellers Association. She looks after all of the Books Are My Bag consumer-facing campaigns, including Bookshop Day, the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards, Irish Book Week, Independent Booksellers Children’s Book of the Month, and Independent Bookshop Week.
Kevin Duffy
@Ofmooseandmen
Kevin and Hetha Duffy set up Bluemoose Books in 2006 to find great new voices not represented in traditional publishing. Kevin has worked for over 30 years in publishing from large commercial houses to academic and business. Bluemoose Books have been shortlisted for several national and international literary prizes. Their books have been translated into 14 languages and sold in over 72 countries. THE GALLOWS POLE by Benjamin Myers won the world’s leading literary prize for historical fiction the £25k Walter Scott Prize in 2018 and recently, LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL by Ronan Hession has been shortlisted for The Booksellers Association Books Are My Bag Awards 2019. They are based in Hebden Bridge.
Claire Napoli
@saladpages
Claire is the Publishing Director and Co-founder of Salad Pages. Claire has over 10 years’ experience in the publishing industry working across a broad range of formats, media and sectors. Claire has worked with authors at both large and small publishing houses. As a Publishing Consultant, Claire has also helped commission and develop content for publishing houses, international organisations and Government bodies.
Salad Pages was set up by husband and wife team Claire and Matthew Napoli in 2018 to help talented young writers, aged 22 and under, publish their books. Claire commissions Salad Pages’ fabulous young authors and works with them throughout their publishing journey to make it a really positive experience. She LOVES her job!
Rebecca Fortuin
@TWA2Becky
Rebecca Fortuin started her career as an Audio Editorial Assistant at Penguin Random House in January 2017. From the East Midlands she had no previous experience in Publishing (or even an office) and didn’t graduate from the Open University until six months later. She now works for HarperCollins as an Audio Editor looking after Avon and HQ. Rebecca’s focus is to push audio innovation whilst highlighting new talent and has partnered with Ministry of Stories, East 15 Acting School and East London Music Academy in her work.
Will Forrester
@official_foz
Will Forrester is Translation and International Manager at English PEN, where he runs PEN Translates – an ACE-funded grant to publishers – edits PEN Transmissions, and programmes international literature events. Previously, he worked for the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth and in the visual arts in Malaysia. He has a BA in English and an MSt in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. Elsewhere, he’s Assistant Editor at Review 31, Programme Manager of an Afghan women’s writing initiative, and a critic, writing for, amongst others, the London Magazine and the Guardian.
John Fish
@johnthefish
Books play a big part of my life. As a young boy one of my earliest teachers saw something and encouraged me to keep reading. Back in the early 1980’s I set up a large Hospital radio network in London and ran this for many years and through this it enabled me to interview stars from stage, TV, music and also writers.
Now I write about books and interview writers on my blog. I get to work with publishers large and small and some of the best literary PR people. My love of books allows me to attend book launches across the country and also book prize events. I read on average 180 books a year nearly all before they are released into bookshops. I have recently just launched a podcast and through this I will be talking all things literary with writers and those in the publishing industry. I write a book review column for a Somerset Magazine and have contributed to other Somerset monthly newspapers talking about bookshops across the county.
In 2018 I ran the successful campaign to get copies The Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane into every Primary School in Somerset which was around 250 and then launch a legacy project with local schools including a celebration event with an audience of around 400 people which took place in October this year.
In 2020 I will be starting work on my first novel which has taken over a year to research and plan.
Janneke Adema
@openreflections
Janneke Adema is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post Office Press (POP). You can follow her research, as it develops, on openreflections.wordpress.
Paula Clemente Vega
@Paula_C_Vega
Paula Clemente Vega is the Marketing Officer for the Open Library of humanities where she is in charge of increasing the visibility of the OLH through outreach, content marketing and advocacy. She has participated in numerous conferences, as well as commissioned numerous interviews and essays as part of the OLH EmpowOA programme: an initiative designed to strengthen the OA humanities context in which the OLH operates. She is also a doctoral candidate in the department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London where she is conducting a research on colonial legacies and art museums in Spain and the UK.
Hanna Waigh
Hanna is currently a Portfolio Marketing Executive at Oxford University Press looking after a varied list of academic journals. Before moving to Oxford (and Marketing) in 2016, Hanna started her ‘book journey’ on Oxford Street in London as a Waterstones Bookseller, and then an Event Co-ordinator at Waterstones Piccadilly and Hatchards. Hanna still enjoys organising events and can often be found volunteering at The Story Museum.
Cassie Leung
@cm_leung
Cassie Leung is a Resourcing Advisor at Penguin Random House, working on all things job application and careers related. This involves everything from writing job adverts and organising interviews to doing careers talks and advising hiring teams. She is one of those people who graduated and didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life and, to date, has been an English teacher in Japan, a very mediocre waitress, a Sales Executive, and a Recruitment Consultant in the PR and Comms sector.