Path to Publication – Adult Non-Fiction

Industry Panel: Path to Publication – Adult Fiction

A panel of industry experts will offer their insights and advice to aspiring authors on the process of publishing adult fiction. Attendees will learn about the role of literary agents and how writers, agents and publishers work together. You will also receive advice on how to approach finding an agent and preparing your work for submission. Come along with any questions you have about how take the first steps towards finding a publisher for your novel.

Introducing the Panel:

Mo Hafeez – Commissioning Editor, Non-Fiction, Faber Books
Mo Hafeez is a commissioning editor at Faber & Faber. He started his career at Granta as a publishing trainee in February 2019 before joining Faber as an editorial assistant; he now publishes across Faber's general non-fiction and music & popular culture lists, and oversees the Guardian Faber list, a partnership between Faber and the Guardian newspaper. He has worked with authors such as Jason Okundaye, Cosey Fanni Tutti, William MacAskill, Adharanand Finn, Keza MacDonald, Aniefiok Ekpoudom, Sanam Maher, Kae Tempest, Grace Dent and Patrick Barkham.

Alpana Saljip – Senior Commissioning Editor, Non-Fiction, Picador Books

Alpana Sajip is a senior commissioning editor for nonfiction at Picador. She joined in 2024 after nearly four years at Penguin, and she publishes into a range of genres including history, biography, politics, current affairs, investigative journalism and narrative nonfiction. Authors she has worked with at Picador and Penguin include Lisa Feldman Barrett, Steve Brusatte, Misha Ewen, Hein de Haas, Isabel Hardman, Elisabeth Leake, Ben Macintyre, Catherine Mas, Tom McTague, Patrick Radden Keefe, Douglas Smith, Krithika Varagur, and Michelle Zauner.

Matt Turner – Literary Agent, Rogers Coleridge & White Literary Agency
Matt Turner is a literary agent, who joined RCW in 2012. He represents writing about society and culture, history and science, as well as memoir and narrative non-fiction - books that shed new light on preconceived ideas and take readers on journeys they didn't know they wanted to go on.

Writers he has worked with have won or been nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction and Non-Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the Charlotte Aitken Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the Sunday Times Short Story Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the JCB Prize, the An Post Irish Book Awards, the Betty Trask Award, the Orwell Prize, the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, the White Review Short Story Prize and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award.

The panel will moderated by Dr Helen Cullen, a novelist and Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University.

About this programme:

Brunel University is a very proud partner of the Nero Book Awards and the Nero New Writers Prize for unpublished writers. With the New Writers Programme, our aim is to support as many aspiring writers as possible with an online series of free creative writing workshops, and publishing webinars.

If you would like to develop your writing craft, learn from incredible authors, and understand more about how publishing works from industry experts, this series is for you.