The Granta Books Team

Philip Gwyn Jones

Executive Publisher

Philip Gwyn Jones was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1966. He decided he could only be an editor while at university in York. After an accelerated publication education at a tiny children's publisher, he joined Collins (which later became HarperCollins) in 1989 as an Editor, spending 15 years there, the last 8 of them as Publisher of Flamingo, its literary list. Among the authors he published there were Isabel Allende, J.G. Ballard, Douglas Coupland, Rana Dasgupta, Joan Didion, Naomi Klein, Jhumpa Lahiri, Doris Lessing, Jim Lewis, Magnus Mills, George Monbiot and Arundhati Roy.

When the Flamingo list was put to sleep in 2004, Jones was freed to set up a new independent house. With philanthropist-campaigning backers Sigrid Rausing and Eric Abraham, Portobello Books Ltd was founded in spring 2005. Its emphases have always been activist non-fiction and internationalist fiction. In 2008, as Portobello Books came together with its new (but older) sibling Granta Books, Jones became Executive Publisher supervising the two imprints. He remains passionately committed to bringing the most stimulating, enlivening writing to the widest possible readership