Judges

Matt Bates

Matt Bates is the Fiction Buyer for WH Smith Travel. He has worked for the company since he was 16 as a Saturday boy on the News Department (but always to be found in the Book Department!). In 1998 he became Non Fiction Buyer for the WHS Travel business before moving to manage Fiction in 2004. He has been named as one of the 1000 most influential Londoners in the Evening Standard, and in 2006 was delighted to be a judge for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award. www.whsmith.co.uk

Carole Blake

Carole Blake has worked in publishing for 49 years. She started in a secretarial position and rose to become the first-ever Rights Manager for Michael Joseph. She was headhunted to start W H Allen’s first rights department, then approached to become Marketing Director of Sphere. After 14 years in publishing, she started her own literary agency which merged to become Blake Friedmann in 1983; Carole heads the book division. It was chosen as one of only twelve British agencies commended by the Society of Authors in their first survey of literary agents. Carole is a past President of the Association of Authors’ Agents, past Chairman of the Society of Bookmen, and she was Chairman of The Book Trade Charity (BTBS) for several years and is now President. She is a member of the advisory board for the post graduate publishing courses run by both City University and UCLA. Her book, From Pitch to Publication (Macmillan), is a bestseller now in its 12th UK printing. Carole’s clients include Elizabeth Chadwick, Anne de Courcy, Barbara Erskine, Ann Granger, Peter James, Beryl Matthews, Lawrence Norfolk, Joseph O’Connor, Sheila O’Flanagan, Tess Stimson, and Julian Stockwin. www.blakefriedmann.co.uk

Heather Lazare

Senior US Editor, Heather Lazare, joined Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2011 after six years in publishing working at the Crown Publishing Group and prior to that, the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Heather has acquired and edited a range of historical fiction from award-winning, New York Times bestselling, and international bestselling authors including: Nancy Bilyeau, Kimberley Freeman, Julia Gregson, Karleen Koen, Michelle Moran, and Anne Easter Smith. Heather has also reissued many novels from the grande dame of historical fiction, Jean Plaidy. She loves to read about little-known historical women and while she does adore tales of the English royalty, she is particularly interested in stories set in the Middle East, China, Russia, Italy, and France, where she spent two years teaching English in Aix-en-Provence. www.simonandschuster.com