New Booker Prize sponsors make Sunday Times Rich List top 50

Husband and wife Sir Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman are among the 50 wealthiest individuals or families in the UK, worth £3bn, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.

Moritz and Heyman will sponsor the Booker Prize through their charitable foundation, Crankstart, which they launched in 2000 to support “the forgotten, the dispossessed, the unfortunate, the oppressed and causes where some help makes all the difference”. Moritz was born in Cardiff but moved to the US in 1976 to work at Sequoia Capital, where he has arranged funding for internet businesses such as Yahoo!, Paypal and LinkedIn.

Four authors made the Rich List this year: J K Rowling, Lord Archer, Barbara Taylor Bradford and E L James.

Rowling climbed to 191st position (from 197th last year), and is worth an estimated £750m thanks to her “golden pen”. The Sunday Times said Rowling has earned around £1bn from her fiction and £200m from films, but is “cautious” about the true size of her fortune thanks to the author’s generosity to good causes, including the Volant Trust, which she set up to fund projects in Scotland for women and young people.

Lord Archer is worth £200m, up £50m from the previous year, placing him in 606th position, while Barbara Taylor Bradford and EL James are worth £160m and £127m, respectively.

Other publishing and media moguls who have made the cut this year include The Thomson Family, whose wealth is estimated at £1.4bn, placing them just outside the top 100 at 107. The privately owned company is run by family members Andrew, Christopher and David Thomson, along with Richard Hall, and it publishes The Beano and various newspapers. The company closed down Parragon, a publisher in Bath, last year.

Fanny Vlamynck, the widow of Tintin creator Hergé, is in joint 606th place with her husband Nick Rodwell, for their management of the Tintin estate, with wealth of £200m. Nigel Blackwell, the former chairman of Blackwell’s, and his family are worth £195m (629th position in the list) and Jonathan Little, founder of The Little Group, a book wholesaler, is worth £150m (787th).

The Sunday Times Rich List is an annual compilation of the richest 1,000 families or individuals in the UK, compiled using public information.

This year the Hinduja brothers, who are industrialists, are in the top spot. They control more than 50 companies with a total turnover of nearly £40bn in 2018 and have personal wealth of £22bn. Property investors David and Simon Reuben are in second place, worth £18.7bn, and last year’s number one – Ineos chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe – is in third (£18.2bn).