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Nicolette Jones
Nicolette Jones is the author of The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea (Abacus) which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and won the Mountbatten Maritime Prize and the International Division of the 2007 US Maritime Literature Awards. See the citation and photos.

Nicolette Jones is also a critic and broadcaster, specialising in literary and arts journalism, who has worked for national newspapers and the book trade press. She has been the Children's Books Editor of The Sunday Times for more than two decades, and in 2012 was shortlisted for the Eleanor Farjeon Award for distinguished service to the world of children’s books. She is experienced in radio and television, and a professional chair of adults’ and children’s events (at, for instance, Cheltenham, Oxford and Charleston literary festivals). Interviewees have included Joan Bakewell, Vince Cable, Richard Ford, Elizabeth Jane Howard, John Humphrys, Erica Jong, Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pullman.

From 2010-13 she was Director of the children's/young adult programme at the Oxford Literary Festival, and Consultant Director for the programme in 2014. She has judged, among other awards, the Orange (now Bailey’s) Prize for Fiction, the Mountbatten Maritime Award, the Carnegie/Greenaway top ten, the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, the Branford Boase Award, the Whitbread (now Costa) Children’s Novel Prize, the Macmillan Prize for Illustration, and Booktrust’s Ten Best New Illustrators, as well as chairing a Children’s Laureate selection committee.

She was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at University College, London 2010-12 and in summer 2013.

Her double award-winning book about the Victorian philanthropist Samuel Plimsoll and his campaign on behalf of sailors, The Plimsoll Sensation (Little, Brown/Abacus), was a Radio 4 Book of the Week (see home page for reviews). She also co-authored, with writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs, an anthology of his work: Blooming Books (Cape).

For nine years she was a trustee of The Reading Agency, is now on the board of the National Academy of Writing, and in 2014 is judging the National Literacy Trust's new award for an unpublished children’s book. Also as a volunteer, she has been a catalyst for several initiatives: pioneering the St Hilda’s Writer’s Day at the Oxford Literary Festival since 2009 (as Chair of the St Hilda’s College Media Network); helping to instigate Booktrust’s Big Picture Campaign to raise appreciation of picturebooks; starting a campaign to commemorate Samuel Plimsoll in Folkestone, his last home, with an exhibition in Folkestone Town Hall and annual Plimsoll Day celebrations (10 February) to raise funds for lifeboats; editing a local news alert that has changed lives; co-founding an award-winning community gardening project; and working with Little Free Libraries to install Islington’s first.

Originally from Leeds, she was a Scholar at St Hilda’s College and winner of a Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for English Literature at Oxford. Offered three American scholarships, she chose to spend a year as a Henry Fellow in the Graduate School of English at Yale University.

She has two children, and her husband, Nicholas Clee, is also an award-winning writer and journalist. She is an honorary member of the Royal Naval Reserve Officers’ Dining Club, despite (like Samuel Plimsoll) never having worked on the crew of a ship.