Nicolette Jones

Nicolette Jones is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who has worked for all the national broadsheets and the book-trade press. Her book about the Victorian philanthropist Samuel Plimsoll and his campaign on behalf of sailors, The Plimsoll Sensation (Little, Brown/Abacus), was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, received widespread critical acclaim, and won maritime literature prizes in the UK and USA.

She collaborated with the author and illustrator Raymond Briggs on an overview of his work Blooming Books (Cape), and has co-edited an award-winning guide to English usage. Specialising in literary and arts journalism, she is the children’s books editor of the Sunday Times, and has been a reviewer, feature-writer, diarist, sub-editor and book-prize judge — from the Orange (now Baileys) prize for fiction to children’s book awards. She regularly chairs events at literary festivals, and has directed the children’s programme at the Oxford Literary Festival. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Eleanor Farjeon award for her ‘outstanding contribution to the world of children’s books’. She is a trustee of the National Academy of Writing, which runs creative writing courses for aspiring authors.

Originally from Leeds, she was a scholar at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She spent a year as Henry Fellow in the graduate school of English at Yale University, where she was a teaching assistant on the celebrated Daily Themes writing course. She has two children and lives in London; her husband is also an award-winning writer and journalist.

Nicolette Jones is an award-winning writer and critic who has written non-fiction for adults and innumerable newspaper articles, and compiled anthologies for young people. For more than two decades she has reviewed the children’s books for The Sunday Times, and is experienced at judging book prizes (from the Women’s Prize to the Empathy Lab selection) and at programming and chairing public events for both young people and adults. Her own track record of academic writing includes studying at Oxford, and on a graduate fellowship at Yale, and she has helped undergraduates and graduates with their writing as a RLF Fellow at University College London and King’s College London.