About Laura

My career began in book publishing; starting out as an assistant at Penguin Random House back in 2006. Having worked my way up in the publicity team, I moved across to HarperCollins before making the switch to work for BookTrust in 2012.

At BookTrust I found my dream job - managing half of their prize portfolio, which at the time included The Women's Prize for Fiction, The Blue Peter Book Awards, The Roald Dahl Funny Prize and The David Cohen Prize, among many more.

Crucially, I also met my dream colleague (yes, it was Robyn) - a true meeting of minds, thanks to a shared love of books, the ability to make each other laugh... and a real enthusiasm for amateur acrostic poetry.

After moving out of London (and with a young family) I was lucky enough to begin working on awards in a freelance capacity, and have never looked back - especially when Robyn and I joined forces again in 2018.

In the past six years our clients have included The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Oscar’s Book Prize, and, most recently, The British Book Awards, and a diverse range of clients and stakeholders, including Amazon UK, EFG Private Bank, Audible, The Sunday Times and The Bookseller.

I feel incredibly lucky to still work on literary prizes more than a decade on. It's a joy to be able to celebrate literature of all shapes and sizes, and an honour to be involved in the important task of helping promote great writing, for readers of all backgrounds and ages.

About Robyn

After a few years in the fashion industry (yes, I'll be the best dressed person at your party), in 2009 I returned to my first true love, the arts, working for Writing on the Wall, Liverpool's biggest and best writing organisation where I cut my teeth programming and delivering a month long literary and arts festival. Radical in nature and speaking to, and for, its community - WOW taught me the transformational power of words and I was hooked from thereon.

After WOW I had the pleasure of managing prizes, and programming for national organisations including Poetry Society and The Orwell Foundation, awarding Kae Tempest their Ted Hughes Award, Darren McGarvey his Orwell Prize and curating annual lectures with Grayson Perry, international dramatic readings with the Sorbonne, AI takeovers with The Barbican and Rebel Rants with Benjamin Zephaniah and Darcus Howe to name but a few of the extraordinary things I still can't believe people let me do.

I arrived at BookTrust in 2015 to work across their adult prizes and, dreamily, the Children's Laureate project that saw me wrangle Chris Riddell throughout his tenure. Alongside general Laureate duties, we curated and delivered a high profile press campaign and tour of schools in the North West's most deprived regions to raise awareness around the importance of school libraries. Oh and then I arranged the Lifetime Achievement Award prize-giving ceremony for Judith Kerr in London Zoo complete with The Tiger that Came to Tea (our colleague Nick in a costume borrowed from the National Theatre). And despite all that, the very best thing to have come out of my time at Booktrust was meeting my now business partner and pal for life Laura.

Laura and I joke that we are two parts of the perfect person - bringing together her methodical, strategy-focussed and entirely unflappable literary prowess and my dynamic energy, in constant curation mode and limbering up to solve a problem. But mostly, we are just very good friends who love working together, which means we're always pulling in the same direction and operate as one brilliant, unstoppable force for artistic excellence. And we are very, very funny but you'll only know that once you hire us as we're trying to project a professional image here.

I feel so privileged to have had a career in the arts and with it the opportunity to make a tangible difference to those most in need. Whether that's giving an emerging writer the prize that validates their journey and cements them as a rising star, seeing someone hear words that speak to their experience from the stalls of a theatre or the stackable chairs of a community centre or simply putting a book into the hands of a child who wouldn't already have one, I am so proud of the work I am able to do.