Dotti Irving

Dotti Irving has been lucky enough to spend her working life in the world of books. After an exhilarating decade at Penguin, she set up Colman Getty, a PR agency which specialised in publishing and campaigning, and where she worked with such inspirational writers as William Boyd, Germaine Greer, Charlie Higson, Nigella Lawson and J.K. Rowling. She handled big-ticket prizes such as the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction (now the Baillie Gifford Prize). In 2012 Dotti sold her company to Four, a larger comms agency, and in July 2022 she stepped down to pursue her independent career again.

As an agent with Greyhound, Dotti is primarily interested in narrative non-fiction, in books that tell a story that rings true and speaks to a wider world.

Dotti is a long-term member of the Groucho Club and a trustee of the Deborah Rogers Foundation which supports emerging talent in the literary world. She was also one of just 12 people, and the only woman, to have featured in every Bookseller Top 150 – the annual ranking of the most influential people in the British book trade – for 21 years running.

As she says, ‘It’s a terrific compliment but possibly less about my own brilliance and more about the fact that publishing has been run by men for far too long. Happily, that is now changing…’