Helen Fraser CBE

Helen Fraser was educated at the Lycee in London, and subsequently at the Collegiate Girls’ School, a girls’ grammar school in Leicester. (She also spent one year in 1963 in a girls’ school in upper New York State.) She got a scholarship to Oxford to read English and graduated with a first in 1970. After university she taught English in Paris for a year and then travelled in India and South East Asia before starting her first job in publishing at Methuen Academic. She started commissioning books in the areas of literary criticism, and sociology and psychology of education. After two years she left to work for a small start-up publisher, Open Books, where she continued to publish in the same areas (one of the titles she signed up, Neville Bennett’s Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, later became the subject of an Open University programme). In 1977 she moved to William Collins, where she worked for ten years, during which she continued to publish academic titles including Jerome Bruner’s The Developing Child series and Margaret Donaldson’s Children’s Minds. But she also broadened her publishing to include literary fiction and more general non-fiction. In 1987 she moved to William Heinemann as publisher, and stayed with the Reed Elsevier group for ten years, eventually as managing director of Reed Consumer Books. In 1997 she joined Penguin as managing director, and in the last thirteen years has launched the careers of authors as diverse as Zadie Smith, Antony Beevor and Jamie Oliver. She received a CBE in the 2010 New Year’s Honours list.