Rufus Purdy – Editor

I began my career dressed as a giant banana (complete with yellow tights), handing flyers to tourists outside Covent Garden tube station. Desperate for a job that would give me some dignity, I went into magazine-publishing and landed the position of Junior Sub-editor at Harper’s Bazaar, where I honed my editorial skills polishing up celebrities’ barely literate copy. A spell at Condé Nast Traveller reawakened a love of seeing the world and, after an enjoyable spell as a sub-editor-for-hire, I became Associate Editor at Psychologies, where I combined the Chief Sub’s role with that of Travel Editor. This led to me being offered the job of editor at boutique-hotel experts Mr & Mrs Smith, where – until my first child was born in June 2009 – I spent my days, writing, editing and commissioning, while unsuccessfully trying to convince my team I was far too busy and important to make them cups of tea. As editor of Family Traveller magazine, I was shortlisted for Launch of the Year at the 2014 BSME Awards. My journalism has appeared in The Times, The Observer, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Post, Condé Nast Traveller, Elle, Grazia and The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, among other publications.

An irresistible offer to switch over to the world of books led to me working at the Curtis Brown literary agency from 2012 to 2018, where I combined the roles of Editor, New Writing at its writing school Curtis Brown Creative and Editor at its digital imprint Studio 28. Highlights included being the editor for espionage-fiction author Alex Gerlis, who sold more than 180,000 digital copies of the three novels we worked on together, and working with Squeeze songwriter Chris Difford on his memoir Some Fantastic Place (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which went on to be longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize.

In 2018, I established the Write Here… novel-writing school, which runs low-priced courses both online and UK cities such as Belfast, Birmingham, Brighton, Edinburgh and Manchester, and has given writers on low incomes the opportunity to learn from author-tutors such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Claire Askew, Lizzie Enfield and Jan Carson. Several writers from these courses – including Paul Laird (The Birth and Impact of Britpop, Pen & Sword), Roisin Maguire (Bardo, Profile Books) and Melissa Welliver (My Love Life and the Apocalypse, Chicken House) – have gone on to get book deals. And many more of the clients I’ve worked with individually as an editor – including Natalie Lewis (Don’t Believe the Hype, Hodder), Loraine Peck (The Second Son, Text Publishing) and Adam Simcox (The Dying Squad, Gollancz) have also had publishing success. Several other editorial clients of mine have also gone on to find representation with literary agents.

I’m currently running my own small, editorially focused literary agency.