Jasmine Horsey promoted to editorial director at Bloomsbury Trade 

Jasmine Horsey has been promoted from senior commissioning editor to editorial director for non-fiction at Bloomsbury Trade.

In the role Horsey will commission and publish across Bloomsbury’s non-fiction list, acquiring in history, arts and culture, current affairs, biography, politics and some popular science from experts or journalists.

In the five years she has been at Bloomsbury, the publisher says Horsey has “played a pivotal role in some of the company’s biggest successes”, working with Alexis Kirschbaum on books including Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell, Humankind by Rutger Bregman and Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem. 

As a commissioning editor she has published prize-winners (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth, winner of the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2021); Sunday Times bestsellers (I May Be Wrong by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad); and many Books of the Year across a wide spectrum of publications (Frank Dikötter’s China After Mao; Carole Angier’s Speak, Silence; Andrew Doig’s This Mortal Coil). Horsey is also the publisher of David Kynaston and Kate Summerscale.

Her future publishing includes Yuan Yang’s Private Revolutions, a contemporary history of China told through the lives of five women which was won in a four-way auction; Alice Rio’s “major revisionist history of the Dark Ages”, won in a seven-way auction; Cathy Haynes’s “captivating” début Telling Time: The Forgotten Art of Sensing the Hour, which she pre-empted; and Nandini Das’s Courting India, described as a “groundbreaking history of the British arrival in India.”

Alexis Kirschbaum, head of Bloomsbury Trade, said: “Jasmine’s integrity, professionalism and drive for excellence has helped her become a formidable commissioning editor and a valued member of the Bloomsbury Trade team. Every year she has grown professionally, earning three promotions in three years, by making major contributions to our publishing culture and to our list in terms of bestsellers, prizes and beautifully written, fascinating books.”