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Amelia Fairney takes redundancy after 27 years with Penguin General
Amelia Fairney will take redundancy after 27 years at Penguin General, following a restructure of the communications team, and start a role at a social enterprise in February 2025.
Fairney will leave the business on 15th January for a new position as head of strategy and communications at Shout Out UK (SOUK), a multi award-winning social enterprise which delivers political and media literacy education and democratic engagement campaigns focused on combating online disinformation. The organisation also acts as the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Media Literacy, chaired by Lord Iain McNicol.
Fairney chose redundancy following a restructure of Penguin General’s communications team but no other details of the changes have been disclosed.
Fairney joined the publisher in 1997. Over the years, she has worked with a host of the publishing house’s most celebrated and bestselling authors including Booker Prize winners Kiran Desai, Pat Barker, Arundhati Roy and Bernardine Evaristo, as well as Dame Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Jonathan Coe, Nick Hornby, Ruth Rendell, Zadie Smith, Ben Macintyre, Sir John Mortimer and others. She also formed part of the core team that pitched for and won Richard Osman’s bestselling debut The Thursday Murder Club for the Viking list.
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Since 2018, she has led the campaign teams for all the books of Barack and Michelle Obama, including the former First Lady’s autobiography Becoming and Barack Obama’s record-breaking 2020 presidential memoir, A Promised Land, which was published entirely in lockdown with bookshops closed, yet achieved first week sales in all editions of over 147,000 copies.
Her campaigns have won and been shortlisted for many Book Marketing Society and PPC awards from Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe in 2000 through to Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry in 2022. She has been shortlisted in both the marketing strategy and publicity categories of The Bookseller industry awards, taking the publicity Nibbie in 2012 for Claire Tomalin’s definitive biography Charles Dickens: A Life. That campaign was also shortlisted for 2012’s annual PR Week Awards.
Fairney also founded and chaired Prime Time, Penguin Random House’s age inclusion staff network, which advocates for the value of a multi-generational workplace.
Last year she gained a distinction in her MA from the University of Westminster in Media, Campaigning and Social Change. Her research focused on media audiences in the digital age and the media framing of the practice of sensitivity reading.
Preena Gadher, managing director of Penguin General, said: “Amelia has delivered defining work at Penguin General. She has been a tireless ambassador for the division, an inspiring leader of her team, championed her colleagues’ successes and had countless successes of her own, driving creativity and impactful campaigns that have not only been sales-driving, but agenda-setting and in many cases, creating lasting social change. We wish her all the best in this exciting next chapter of her career.”
Fairney stated: “Although I will miss all my friends at PRH – not to mention all the wonderful books and authors – I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my values over the past few weeks and feel the time is right for me to take this opportunity to do my bit in fighting the misinformation and division which seems to be becoming more entrenched in the digital media environment – and wider society.”
She added: “I’m a huge admirer of the work done by SOUK and I’m looking forward to working with them and the parliamentarians of the APPG in this next stage of my career."
Fairney joins SOUK on 2nd February and can be contacted there at amelia@shoutoutuk.org.
