Julian Beecroft – Editor

I'm a freelance UK-based editor and writer with more than two decades' experience working for some of the biggest publishers in the industry, such as A&C Black/Bloomsbury and imprints in the Quarto group. As an editor I have worked across the arts and humanities on some fiction but hundreds of non-fiction books, including a number of US titles. I have developed particular specialisms in art history, history and memoir, though I'm comfortable working across a much wider spread of genres in the arts and humanities, as my portfolio of edited titles bears out.After a short editors' correspondence course, my real editorial training was the two years I spent studying for postgraduate diplomas in translation from the Institute of Linguists in London, first from French into English and then from Spanish into English; there is nothing like trying to render the idioms of another language in those of your own to sharpen your awareness of what clear, idiomatic English prose should look like and sound like. But editing is a two-way process that I see from both sides. As a writer and as a cultural storyteller, over more than a decade I have produced blog series and other materials for museums and galleries in the UK and Europe, and arts or travel journalism (features and reviews) for legacy media brands including the Economist and the Guardian. One highlight: a seven-week journey across Canada in 2011, blogging about Canadian art for Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, as well as writing travel and culture features on the same subject for the Guardian and the London Magazine, both of whom I have written for since.Over the past seven years, I have also written 10 narrative non-fiction titles of my own, mostly on art (again, see my portfolio for some of these). In early 2020, I was awarded a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing by the University of Sussex; my thesis examined the place of the nation state in a globalised world and included a novella of my own. All of which means I bring a wealth of experience, subject knowledge, editorial sensitivity, intellectual rigour and instinctual storytelling flair to any text I work on, either as an editor in serving the writer or as a writer in serving the idea. At its best, the editorial process is a conversation between writer and editor, with the editor's role to help the writer articulate that idea in the best way possible; to say exactly what they mean. Any client will find me diligent, punctual and responsive in pursuit of that goal.