Emily Berry – Editor

As a published writer myself I know both sides of the editorial process. I understand that it can feel very tender to see one’s writing in someone else’s hands, and I strive to always be a sensitive and supportive editor. I have over 20 years’ editorial experience as a freelance editor, copyeditor and proofreader working for publishers including Faber & Faber, HarperCollins, Profile Books, Little, Brown and Random House. I am equally happy taking a zoomed-out view (as in a developmental edit), or a zoomed-in one (as with proofreading or line edits). I can see the wood AND the trees. I have particularly extensive experience working with poets, having edited The Poetry Review (the UK’s leading poetry journal) for five years, which involved editing poems, essays and reviews, and I have worked with a number of poets on developing their first collections. But I love working with fiction and creative non-fiction too. As editor-in-chief of the sleep app Sleep Worlds, I commission and edit stories by published novelists and poets, so I also have a sideline in editing writing with a view to it being more suitable for audio.

As an editor I like to think of myself as person-centred. I want to understand what you’re trying to do with your writing, so that I can help you make it the very best it can be. I never look to impose an external idea of ‘good writing’ onto your work. I believe a skilled editor should be, in some sense, invisible: I aim to draw out each writer’s strengths so they can shine more brightly. I’m interested in poetic writing of all kinds – whether that’s actual poetry, poetic fiction, creative non-fiction, lyric essays, and hybrid forms. In my own writing and in others’, I’m curious about the borderlands of genre and where our rigid literary categories dissolve. If that sounds like a project you’re working on, I’d love to hear from you.