Jimmy Iacobelli will join the Atria Publishing Group as art director on September 4. He was previously art director at HarperCollins.
The Rona Jaffe Foundation announced the winners of their annual writers’ awards: Chelsea Bieker (fiction/nonfiction), Lisa Chen (nonfiction), Lydia Conklin (fiction), Gabriela Garcia (fiction), Karen Outen (fiction/nonfiction), and Alison C. Rollins (poetry).
The Frankfurt Book Fair will feature Macmillan ceo John Sargent in their annual ceo interview on Wednesday, October 10 at 2 PM. (If you attend, make sure to go say hello afterwards — he won’t have to journal it. As of August 12, Macmillan became the last of the five settling publishers to have its consent decree with the Department of Justice expire, which means they have been relieved of the extensive antitrust compliance and oversights provisions of those agreements.)
Obituary
UK literary agent Michael Sissons, 83, died of melanoma on August 24. The Times writes, “Sissons was one of the grand old men of British publishing, putting the fear of God not only into publishers but also into his authors. Anthony Blond, his fellow publisher, once described him as ‘possibly the most brilliantly belligerent agent in London.”
Sissons became director of the agency AD Peters at age 30 and inherited the business in 1973. It was renamed PFD (Peters Fraser & Dunlop) in 1988 following a merger. He also helped to start the UK’s Association of Authors’ Agents in 1978.
Current PFD ceo Caroline Michel tells the Bookseller, “I would say that he was the godfather of the industry. For the whole of my publishing and agenting career, he was the best teacher and mentor I could ever have hoped for.”