About the Author

Richard Charkin

Richard Charkin has held senior posts at several major publishing houses, including Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Current Science Group, and Reed Elsevier. He is a former non-executive director of the Institute of Physics Publishing, Liverpool University Press, and Cricket Properties Ltd, and a former president of the International Publishers Association, the U.K Publishers Association, and The Book Society. Currently, he is Chair of Thames & Hudson Ltd, a board member of Bloomsbury China's Beijing joint venture with China Youth Press, a member of the international advisory board of Frankfurter Buchmesse, and a senior adviser to Nkoda and Shimmr AI. He also runs his own publishing business, Mensch Publishing and is the author, with Tom Campbell, of My Back Pages: An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972-2022. He lectures on the publishing courses at London College of Communications, City University, and University College London, and is a visiting professor at the University of the Arts London. In June 2024, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, OBE, for his "services to publishing and literature."