Philip Gwyn Jones
Philip is currently closed to unsolicited fiction submissions.
After thirty-three years as an editor and publisher, just over half of them in corporate publishing, just under half in independent publishing, Philip made the Damascene conversion to agenting in spring 2023 in order to move upstream, closer to the wellspring, to work with writers and thinkers in developing their ideas, their texts, their careers, and defending their interests.
In reverse chronological order, he was Publisher of Picador at Pan Macmillan, Scribe UK, Granta & Portobello Books, and Flamingo and Fontana Press at HarperCollins. Writers he published won the Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer, James Tait Black, Women’s Prize for Fiction, PEN, John Llewellyn Rhys, US National Book Award, French Goncourt, German Book Award, Canadian Governor-General’s, US NBCC and CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction prizes, and were shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Orwell Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, Baillie Gifford Prize, Costa Book Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, amongst many others.
Philip believes there is nothing more thrilling than first encountering a style, a character, an idea, a fusion, a vision never seen before. He is proud to have been the first British publisher to have spotted the originality in and offered a contract to Katherine Boo, Melissa Broder, Anna Burns, Eleanor Catton, Sloane Crosley, Anthony Doerr, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julian Gough, Andrew Hankinson, Nino Haratischvili, Judith Hermann, Naomi Klein, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mark Lynas, Ben Marcus, Magnus Mills, Azadeh Moaveni, Emiliano Monge, Gavin McCrea, Patrick Ness, Ellena Savage, Kathryn Schulz, Zadie Smith, Jachym Topol and Tommy Wieringa amongst others. As an agent, he is looking for their equals in invention, intelligence and impact.
Among the other writers with whom he worked on multiple books were Lorraine Adams, Isabel Allende, JG Ballard, Nicola Barker, Andrea Barrett, Elif Batuman, Marina Benjamin, Michael Bracewell, Judy Budnitz, Douglas Coupland, Agnes Desarthe, Patrick deWitt, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Erskine, Penelope Fitzgerald, Patrick Gale, Janice Galloway, Barbara Gowdy, Lavinia Greenlaw, Philip Hensher, Ed Hollis, Cynan Jones, Steve Jones, Ruchir Joshi, Han Kang, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jill Lepore, Doris Lessing, Jim Lewis, Sam Lipsyte, Sarah Manguso, Maria McCann, Cormac McCarthy, Frank McCourt, Melanie McGrath, Sarah Moss, Herta Mueller, Raj Patel, Paul Preston, Keith Ridgway, Arundhati Roy, Lionel Shriver, Jane Smiley, Douglas Stuart, Amy Tan, Nick Timmins, Dimitri Verhulst and Louisa Young.
Made in Wales, educated there and in Yorkshire, trained in London, now living under Cambridgeshire’s dreaming skies, Philip has had the privilege of having the world opened up to him by the book business, participating in many editorial fellowships and literary festivals worldwide, from Cartagena to Krakow. He has served it as a Trustee and President of the Royal Literary Fund and as Trustee of English PEN for about a decade apiece, was a Creative Writing Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and currently does his national service on the Grants Panel of the Books Council of Wales.
