60 Richard Dawkins
Author
Dawkins has just entered the bestseller lists again with his family science book The Magic of Reality. He has had a stint as Oxford's professor for the public understanding of science – or the public abuse of faith, his critics would say. Before then the biologist pulled off the remarkable feat of producing seminal books in two genres: first The Selfish Gene in 1976 set him up as a scientific commentator, and then, 30 years later, The God Delusion made him atheism's leading standard-bearer.
61 Stephenie Meyer
Author
If Stephenie Meyer's feelings were hurt by the news that her books come fourth in the list of those most frequently donated to Oxfam, then she might console herself with the fact that she's also the shop's fourth-bestselling author. Or, indeed, that her Twilight books earned her $21m in the annual period to April 2011. In fact, the vampire romance queen's sales have declined – largely because the Twilight Saga has been completed – but it's all relative: Meyer can still take the credit for establishing herself as the apparently invincible leader of the global young adult market.
62 Deborah Treisman
Fiction editor, New Yorker
In control of the New Yorker's fiction output since 2003, Treisman has successfully followed in the footsteps of such legendary editors as William Maxwell and Roger Angell, who made the magazine the natural home of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, SJ Perelman and Woody Allen. It is to her credit that her team's choice of the magazine's weekly short story remains one of the most coveted spots in all magazine publishing. Her responsibilities as taste-maker also extend to projects such as last year's list of the 20 best North American writers under the age of 40; those who made the cut included Wells Tower, Nell Freudenberger, Joshua Ferris and Nicole Krauss.
63 Stephanie Duncan
Digital media director, Bloomsbury "The fact is," commented Stephanie Duncan when the Bloomsbury Reader project was announced, "digital gives you a way to bring books back to life." The publisher's digital mastermind will kick off this autumn by focusing on 500 books that are no longer available, including titles by Alan Clark, Rose Macaulay, VS Pritchett and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Offering readers the chance to purchase ebooks as part of a print-on-demand package, Duncan promises affordable prices and high-spec editions, hoping to capitalise on reader demand for those little curiosities and out-of-the-way backlists.
64 Dan Brown
Author
All you really need to know about Dan Brown is that, according to one rich list published earlier this year, he's earned $400m during the course of his writing career. Yep: $400m. And that it's almost obligatory to invoke him whenever you want to describe a situation involving a thicket of conspiracies; it is even difficult to find a preview of this year's Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at London's National Gallery that doesn't mention him. His prose may be mocked, but the books send their fans on tourist pilgrimages from Scottish churches to Parisian galleries.
65 Lennie Goodings
Publisher, Virago Press Goodings has gone through plenty of adjustments during her decades-long connection with Virago; in her time, the press has been an independent, changed hands and gone through a management buyout. Owned by Little, Brown since 1996, its survival is down in part to Goodings's steady leadership and her ability to combine literary discernment with commercial acumen. Inspiring great loyalty in her authors – Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Natasha Walters and Susie Boyt among them – she also displays a sure touch with a rich backlist, overseeing initiatives such as deluxe editions of Virago Modern Classics.
66 Tariq Ali
Author, commentator A magnet for TV cameras during 60s protests (such as the anti-Vietnam demo in London's Grosvenor Square in 1968), Ali has been a prominent leftwing voice ever since, focusing in recent years on neoliberalism, Islam, America's wars, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Long associated with New Left Review and its publishing spin-off Verso Books (which published his latest book, The Obama Syndrome), he also writes and blogs regularly for publications including the London Review of Books and the Guardian.
67 Robert Silvers
Editor, New York Review of Books Silvers is the man the greatest writers want to write for, on the basis that he will treat their ideas and their sentences as seriously as if they were his own. He is rumoured never to leave his desk; every change to every comma is discussed at length, even with the grandest of writers. Since the NYRB was founded in 1963 during a publishing strike, Silvers has been in control, co-editing with Barbara Epstein until her death in 2006. Early contributors included William Styron, Robert Lowell and WH Auden; contemporary stars include JM Coetzee, Ronald Dworkin, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith.
68 Andrew Motion
Poet In the two years since Motion retired as a ground-breaking poet laureate who turned the job into a being a champion of poetry, he has hardly been idle. A reviewer and teacher of creative writing, he also found time to write his first play about the impact of the Afghan war. Motion has become an influential figure on cultural committees devoting time to chairing the Arts Council of England's literature panel as well as having been chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and last year's Booker prize panel.
69 Sarah Waters
Author When the BBC adaptation of The Night Watch, Waters's fourth novel, was screened in July, one of the biggest complaints was that at 90 minutes it was too short. This response also said something about how much Waters's fans are wedded to her intricate plotting. Over the years, she's made the world of the Victorian sensation novel, as well as stories with a lesbian theme, both critically and commercially popular. As happy in the 1860s London of Fingersmith as the postwar countryside of The Little Stranger, Waters is now working on a novel set in the 1920s.
70 Christopher MacLehose
Publisher, Quercus The man who brought Stieg Larsson to the UK – for a comparative song – has spent a career introducing British readers to fiction in translation. As publisher of Harvill for 21 years, his authors range from Henning Mankel, Haruki Murakami and WG Sebald to Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. MacLehose joined Quercus in 2006, only a couple of years after its launch. Dedicated to literature in translation and crime fiction, other notable writers on the books are Umberto Eco, Cees Nooteboom, Roberto Saviano and Elias Khoury. With credentials like these, it's no wonder MacLehose was awarded a CBE in this year's New Year honours list.
71 Hilary Mantel
Author When, after a range of impressively diverse novels, Wolf Hall won the Booker prize in 2009, Mantel became an overnight publishing sensation that in reality had been many years in the making. It's not often that such high quality meets high sales. Working on a vast fictional canvas that revived historical figures but also made them seem utterly recognisable, she lit a fire under the historical novel and inspired huge numbers of people to take on a 670-page fictional biography of Thomas Cromwell that doesn't even make it to the scaffold. With a sequel in progress (The Mirror and the Light) and a sideline as a highly respected critic and essayist, this is Mantel's time.
72 Jeremy Hunt
Culture secretary The boyish culture secretary is no philistine; he made his fortune in publishing (of directories), and manages cultural policy with the amiable junior minister Ed Vaizey, an art critic's son. But their combined charm doesn't disguise the effects of coalition policy, with organisations wiped out due to Arts Council cuts and libraries closed due to pressure on council spending.
73 Ahdaf Soueif
Author, PalFest founder
Educated in both Egypt and Britain, Soueif made her breakthrough as a novelist with The Map of Love in 1999, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize and translated into several languages. Also a translator (notably of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah), she has been more visible in recent years – particularly during the Arab spring – as a commentator. In 2008 she was the founding chair of PalFest, an annual Palestinian festival of literature.
74 John Le Carré
Author Once invisible, the former spy has now come in from the cold, and actually cameos in the new Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy film. This reflects a belated acceptance that he's one of Britain's literary greats, not just a spinner of yarns – a recognition advanced by his increasing readiness to address political issues (in both public debate and fiction), and by the evidence of his influence in works by writers such as William Boyd and David Hare.
75 Ravi Mirchandani
Publishing director, Atlantic Books Previously at Heinemann, where being part of the corporate machinery of Random House didn't suit him, Mirchandani has sealed a reputation for talent-spotting – vying with the likes of Simon Prosser and Jamie Byng to be the best of the younger generation of editors – since joining Toby Mundy's indie. Aravind Adiga's unexpected Booker prize triumph with Atlantic's The White Tiger was his equivalent of a tennis grand slam win.
76 Nick Barley
Director, Edinburgh international book festival In December 2010, you decide the theme of the 2011 festival will be "Revolutions". The next month, the Arab spring begins, and come August a revolution actually takes place (in Libya) during the three-week festival. Otherwise, his programming of "the world's biggest books festival" deftly balances the political strand with literary and children's events; the internationalism the festival's title commits him to is combined with preserving a sense of Scottishness.
77 Nicholas Pearson
Publishing director, Fourth Estate One challenge for the head of HarperCollins's liveliest division is running an imprint your boss used to run, ensuring a special scrutiny (Fourth Estate was founded as an indie by Victoria Barnsley); another is keeping it quick on its toes, though it's now part of a giant company. Undaunted, Pearson's most notable successes include Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and winning the Booker with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
78 Amanda Ross
TV producer Ross is less of a force than she was as selections queen of Richard & Judy's book club. Back then getting chosen guaranteed a phenomenal sales boost, and so publishers pitched titles to her as if their entire year depended on the outcome (it probably did) and gave her VIP status at parties. Celebrities chat on a sofa in her new TV book club, which doesn't give sales the old turbo-thrust but still has an impact.
79 Mary-Kay Wilmers
Editor, London Review of Books Wilmers succeeded Karl Miller at the fortnightly title in 1992, and also subsidises it via a family trust. Though claiming to "just look after the commas", over almost two decades she's drawn on donnish journalists and journalistic dons to adroitly orchestrate a mixture of weighty reviews, current affairs and fun, the latter often supplied by Alan Bennett. Despite being uncompromisingly highbrow, the LRB continues to put on circulation, has successfully entered the digital age and has opened an excellent independent bookshop and café.
80 Daisy Goodwin
Author, TV producer and presenter Goodwin has always been involved in promoting books and reading since her days at the BBC, but how she goes about it has shifted from year to year. First there were TV films about authors and the magazine show The Bookworm; then successful poetry anthologies and accompanying programmes she presented; more recently a mix of poem of the week selections, book reviews, writing fiction herself and TV contests celebrating public verse reading.
81 Neil Gaiman
Author In a publishing landscape where it's essential to be adaptable, Neil Gaiman has a headstart in that he relishes the challenge of writing for all ages and across a variety of media and genres (his much-lauded episode of Doctor Who was shown last May). Now his devoted fans and 1.6m Twitter followers can look forward to Gaiman's novel American Gods hitting the small screen. Given that a 10th anniversary edition of the book was published this year with 12,000 words of extra text, Gaiman's unlikely to run short of material when he sits down to write the adaptation.
82 Sam Husain
CEO, Foyles Just as most bricks-and-mortar booksellers seem ready to retrench in the face of digital and online expansion, Foyles is getting the builders in: at its famous flagship store in London's Charing Cross Road, which will move a few doors down into a larger space, and at the soon-to-open Westfield shopping centre in Stratford City, next door to the Olympic site. Husain, the accountant who took over in 2007, has led the six-strong chain back to profitability by resisting heavy discounting and trumpeting the virtues of a knowledgeable and passionate staff – music to book lovers' ears.
83 Antonia Byatt
Director of literature, Arts Council England As director of literature, Byatt had to weather a difficult period in March when the winners and losers of Arts Council England's latest funding round were announced – its decisions made in the shadow of a government cut of £118m. Byatt (not to be confused with her mother, the novelist) insisted that investment in literature was actually increasing by 9.9% in real terms, in response to the upoar at the withdrawal of funding to the Poetry Book Society. But despite disagreements, many felt that ACE had shown transparency and fairness in grim circumstances.
84 Colm Tóibín
Author and publisher It's a new term for Tóibín, who is taking over from Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at Manchester University – not an easy act to follow, since Amis was credited with a vast surge in course applications. As well as working with postgraduates and taking part in public events, Tóibín will also teach a new course entitled Arts for Writers, bringing composers and artists into the classroom. Alongside Tuskar Rock, the publishing enterprise he started with literary agent Peter Straus, and, of course, his novels, short stories and journalism, Tóibín is set to be a very busy man.
85 Alan Bennett
Author
Bennett has moaned about inspiration drying up now he's in his late 70s, but there's been no halt to a flow of plays, memoirs and fiction, recently represented respectively by the National Theatre's The Habit of Art, A Life Like Other People's and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories. An increasingly provocative national treasure, he has tended to confine interventions on public issues to individual stances (such as rejecting an honorary Oxford degree because Rupert Murdoch funds a chair there), digs at government philistinism or pennypinching in his diaries, or plays' subtexts. In May he came out in support of libraries, calling closing them "child abuse".
86 Peter Stothard
Editor, Times Literary Supplement Stothard had edited the Times for a decade when he switched to the TLS, also Murdoch-owned, in 2003. While not shifting the furniture around dramatically, he's brought a newspaper man's eye to the donnish weekly, making it less musty, livening up the covers, and successfully running Mary Beard's blog on the website. Eyebrows were raised, however (and an all-star protest letter printed), when it recently emerged that his respected fiction editor Lindsay Duguid was to leave.
87 Peter Straus
Literary agent and publisher Few publishing professionals embody a love of literature so obviously as Straus, literary agent to poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Atkinson and many rising stars. Formerly publisher of Picador and editor in chief at Macmillan, Straus joined Rogers, Coleridge & White in 2002, becoming its managing director in 2006. An avid book collector, Straus is also described as the Booker prize's "honorary archivist", and last year masterminded its Lost Man Booker prize, won by JG Farrell's The Troubles. He also set up the publishing enterprise Tuskar Rock with Colm Tóibín.
88 Andrew Davies
Author and screenwriter The ripped shirts and alabaster embonpoints of Pride and Prejudice may be longer ago than we care to remember, but Davies remains the adapter's adapter, this year bringing Anna Maxwell Martin to our screens in his version of Winifred Holtby's South Riding. Big-canvas costume drama may be under threat from dwindling budgets and reality television, but you'd back old hand Davies to come out on top.
89 Tom Holland
Author, chair of the Society of Authors As chair of the Society of Authors, the author of Rubicon, Millennium and the forthcoming The Shadow of the Sword has plenty on his plate. The society is active in the rapidly evolving landscape of e-rights, and Holland has been vocal in urging writers to stake their claim to higher ebook royalties than publishers might wish to give them. In addition, it is fighting off the BBC's plans to reduce coverage of short stories on Radio 4. And it is currently hosting a short story "tweetathon", in which writers such as Sarah Waters and Ian Rankin will collaborate with tweeters to produce a short story in 670 words.
90 Caroline Michel
Literary agent
It's been a turbulent few years for publisher-turned-agent Michel. When she took over as chief executive at agency PFD in 2007, she was quickly faced with the defection of a group of senior agents to form rival company United Agents, complete with backlist battles. Last year, PFD merged with MF Management, run by Matthew Freud and Michael Foster, with Michel and Foster established as co-chief execs of the newly created The Rights House, but a number of PFD agents quit the company. The Rights House's new partnership with Bloomsbury in a digital publishing venture might, however, signal a change in fortune.
91 Simon Schama
Historian, broadcaster
Schama's career has seen him transformed from obscure, if respected, academic, to best-selling writer to the face and voice of history on TV. For someone whose day job is as a professor in New York, he manages to find plenty of opportunities to pop up over here, whether it's making series for the BBC (recently on painting and American history, but previously an ambitious chronicle of Britain), writing on food for a glossy or culture for the Financial Times, or as an entertaining star turn at literary festivals.
92 Jonathan Heawood
Director, English PEN
Formerly at the Observer and the Fabian Society, Heawood joined the English arm of the organisation that works for freedom of expression and persecuted writers in 2005. Since then he's raised its profile, via campaigns, the newish PEN/Pinter prize (won by Tony Harrison, Hanif Kureishi and David Hare), discussions and other events, and the annual fundraising quiz.
93 Anthea Bell
Translator Bell is the doyenne of translators, who brought the Asterix books to generations of British children; others of her children's books include Cornelia Funke's Inkworld trilogy from German, and Hans Christian Andersen stories from Danish. She was responsible for the rediscovery of Stefan Zweig in English, and also translated WG Sebald's books, including Austerlitz. She regularly wins awards, picking up the Oxford-Weidenfeld translation prize in 2009.
94 Hisham Matar
Author, commentator Libyan-born Matar swept on to the literary scene when his first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker prize and the Guardian First Book award, in 2006. Though he would prefer to be thought of a novelist, his life story has drawn him irresistibly into becoming a mouthpiece for the torments of his homeland. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance – out this year – reflected the political kidnapping of his father in Egypt.
95 Tanya Seghatchian
Film producer and formerly head of Film Fund, BFI Seghatchian was involved with the Harry Potter franchise before joining the British Film Council; when the BFC was abolished, BFI head Amanda Nevill recruited her in a similar role. The book world will be hoping adaptations head her agenda; besides Harry, she's worked on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. Long titles would seem to be essential.
96 Alan Moore
Graphic novelist The godfather of the British graphic novel emerged from the 1970s underground scene and over the following decades shuttled between uneasy collaboration with US comics empires and vehement independence and solo projects. Credited with paving the way for Neil Gaiman and other younger writers, he's also had his reputation burnished by film studios' recent enthusiasm for adapting his works such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta. The world of graphic fiction wouldn't be the same without him.
97 Antony Beevor
Military historian First a soldier, then a novelist, Beevor found his metier at last in 1998 with Stalingrad, the first winner of the Samuel Johnson prize. His books are unusual in being serious non-fiction that sit alongside cookery titles and celebrity memoirs in bestseller lists, as he showed again with Berlin – The Downfall 1945 in 2002. He was also effective when he lobbied for fellow authors in a stint as chairman of the Society of Authors.
98 Ted Smart
Founder, The Book People Now in his 60s, Smart founded discount bookseller The Book People in 1988 which notably transformed the selling of books for children. It picks books that will sell, cuts deals with publishers, and – as in the old slogan – piles 'em high and sells 'em cheap. The company was hit by the recession, but in its last results things seemed to have stabilised. And Smart, as seen by his place in the Sunday Times Rich List, has done well out of a simple idea.
99 Amanda Hocking
Self-published author When her vampire and zombie stories for teens were rejected by traditional publishers, Hocking – who is in her mid-20s and lives in Minnesota – turned in 2010 to publishing them herself and selling online; other authors turned green when it emerged that she had made $2m in sales in her first year. Duly established as self-publishing's poster girl, she made a lucrative deal in March for a conventionally published new series.
100 You
Reader, buyer, blogger, commenter, tweeter …
At one time, authors, publishers and booksellers ganged up to flog books, and you had to like them or lump them. Now, you have your say in online forums, on Twitter and so on, and can look at everything available (not what a shop thinks you want) and summon titles in a few clicks. You can even publish your own books and dispense with publishers, editors, publicists, critics and booksellers altogether. The reader has more power than ever before and never have public conversations about books been wider or more intense.
