Candice Carty-Williams leaves Vintage

Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams has left Vintage after almost three years as senior marketing executive at the imprint.

A Penguin Random House spokesperson confirmed that Carty-Williams had resigned and left the imprint on 21st May with her replacement still to be confirmed. Her departure was announced to PRH staff in early spring. Vintage declined to share further details on her departure.

Carty-Williams, described as “Queenie author and culture writer” on her Twitter profile, has written for publications such as the Guardian, i-D and Stylist among others. She is yet to confirm her future plans or job role. 

Billed as a “painful and comic story” of a 25 year-old black woman living in south London, Carty-Williams' debut novel Queenie was snapped up by Orion in September 2017 in a six-figure deal following a four-publisher auction. It entered the Sunday Times Bestseller hardback chart at number two after being published on 11th April and has sold almost 12,000 copies for £134,000, according to Nielsen Bookscan. The author also recently confirmed that a screen adaptation of the novel “is happening” in an interview with Stylist interview. 

Carty-Williams joined Vintage in September 2016 and was a mentor on the PRH Write Now scheme. She was named a Bookseller Rising Star shortly before she joined Vintage and went on to be shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize in 2017.

Previously she worked at HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate, joining as marketing assistant in 2014 before being promoted to marketing executive in 2015. Whilst at HarperCollins she launched the 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize and worked on campaigns for books by David Cronenberg, Andrew Marr and J G Ballard among others.

In 2016 Carty-Williams wrote a blog for The Bookseller about how there needs to be more action around diversity and inclusion in publishing. She wrote of BAME representation in books: "We need editors to look further than what agents bring to them, or to solely seek out what they know and like, and we need agents to diversify and broaden their client lists. Acceptance and good intentions are great, but sadly they’re not enough.

“We, as BAME marketers, editors, publicists and agents, work hard. We work hard on books that don’t cater to us and whose authors don’t have us in mind, and we don’t mind at all because we love books, and we love stories. But we need to see ourselves in these stories too.”