Ellis to retire as PR director for William Collins after 34 years

Helen Ellis, PR director for William Collins, is retiring after 34 years. She will leave HarperCollins at the end of March. 

Ellis has led the publicity campaigns for landmark titles including Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana. She also managed the publicity rollout for some of the biggest political autobiographies of recent times, delivering award-winning campaigns for former Prime Ministers John Major and Margaret Thatcher. She also led the campaign for Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man. Other notable authors she has worked with over the years include J G Ballard, Doris Lessing, Bernard Cornwell, Richard Holmes and Max Hastings. She also publicised her late husband Tim Binyon’s prizewinning biography, Puskhin. 

Ellis joined HarperCollins in 1989 in the role of publicity director of what was then the trade division having previously worked at Andre Deutsch and Hamish Hamilton. Over the next three decades she led various PR teams and for many years oversaw the publicity output for the entire company as group publicity director. More recently, following a restructure she became PR director for William Collins. In 2012 she was awarded an OBE for services to publishing. 

William Collins publishing director Arabella Pike said: “The day we’ve been dreading has come. Helen has been the cornerstone of our publishing for decades. A friend, comrade in arms and unrepentant champion of all the books she’s publicised. We have laughed, travelled and negotiated endless launches, dinners, festivals, prize ceremonies and parties. Not to mention some crazy car journeys. I don’t know what we will do without her. She has taught me vast amounts about this industry – how to distinguish between what matters and the cascade of rubbish that doesn’t. But most importantly that the author is always centre stage. She is a serious reader and has a genius in building campaigns, always with wit, grace and howls of laughter. Her beloved garden in Oxfordshire and her many friends will bloom as they see more of her. Just as we, her adoring colleagues mourn deeply her decision to retire. She will leave a chasm behind her.” 

William Collins executive publisher David Roth-Ey added: “It’s nigh on impossible to do justice to Helen Ellis’s immense contribution to our publishing at HarperCollins. Not only has she repeatedly delivered blockbuster PR campaigns and exemplary author care for our biggest authors, she’s been an equally ferocious champion of those authors at the very beginning of their careers. Helen never downs tools and says, ‘job done’, she pursues every angle. Her keen sense of humour and unmatched expertise will be missed by all of us who’ve had the pleasure and the honour of working with her.” 

Ellis commented: “It’s a great bonus in life to love your job and I feel very lucky to have loved mine. I’ve had a wonderful working life and over many eventful years at HarperCollins in various publicity roles it’s been an enormous privilege to have worked with so many exceptional authors and on such an incredible range of remarkable books. I’m most grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given and proud of all that’s been achieved. I’ve especially loved my time at William Collins and working on fantastic books alongside brilliant and talented colleagues has been tremendously rewarding and a lot of fun. The last three decades have flashed by and it’s going to be a huge wrench leaving it all behind, but I am now looking forward to moving on and having more time to smell the roses.”