Pat Eisemann has been promoted to executive director of publicity at Holt.
Emma Joss has been promoted to associate publicist for Doubleday.
At Workman Publishing, Jodi Weiss has been promoted to executive director, gift and mass merchant sales; Liz Hunter is taking on the role of associate director, field sales; Caitlin Kleinschmidt will be taking on the additional responsibility of managing Workman’s relationship with Baker and Taylor in addition to her other duties as national account manager; Angela Campbell moves up to director of sales operations; and JT Green has been promoted to sales analyst. Terri Ruffino will join the company’s art department as director, special projects. She has been a freelancer at Workman, after serving as director of graphics at Macy’s.
Sara Hartman-Seeskin has been promoted to senior sales manager, rights and exports at Sourcebooks.
Lauren Cerand has joined A Public Space as marketing and development director, working in the office two days per week.
Awards
Anthony Marra, won the Simpson Family Literary Prize, a $50,000 award honoring mid-career authors.
Three of the 18 judges for the Nobel Prize for literature have resigned, following the scandal from last December, when prominent Swede Jean-Claude Arnault was accused of multiple incidents of sexual assault and harassment but also with leaking the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature in advance on multiple occasions (his wife Katarina Frostenson Arnault is a member of the Swedish Academy). The AP reports that Klas Ostergren, Kjell Espmark and former permanent secretary Peter Englund resigned after losing a vote to exclude Katarina Frostenson going forward. The move is extraordinary, since committee members are appointed for life. Englund wrote in a Swedish newspaper, “Decisions have been made which I can neither support nor defend and I have therefore decided not to participate anymore in the work of the Swedish Academy.”
Bookselling
A sale of Waterstones to hedge fund Elliott Advisors, the UK branch of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, is “likely to close” at the end of April, according to the belief of a single source speaking to the Bookseller. Closing a deal has already taken longer than expected, since Sky News reported in late January that Elliott was given “a short period of exclusivity within which to conclude negotiation.” The sale has caused a delay in pay raises to senior booksellers. The UK’s national minimum wage rose on April 1 to £7.83 an hour for people over 25. The bookseller’s managing director James Daunt said senior staff could expect a raise soon and “the increase would not need to wait for the new owners.”