Lyons and Stewart to join Hodder commercial fiction team

Tallulah Lyons and Lucy Stewart have been hired by Hodder Fiction to help drive strategy across its commercial publishing.

Lyons will join in the newly created role of editorial director for Hodder Commercial in mid-November, reporting to publishing director Phoebe Morgan. Currently commissioning editor at #Merky Books, her recent publishing includes Jyoti Patel’s The Things That We Lost and The Situationship by Taylor-Dior Rumble.

She also worked with authors across the imprint, such as Calum Jacobs, Ramla Ali and Jade L B, author of Keisha the Sket, winner of the Discover Award at the 2022 British Book Awards. Lyons also helped to launch the inaugural #Merky Books literary festival.

Lucy Stewart will join from HarperFiction in mid-October as senior commissioning editor for the commercial team – replacing Lily Cooper who recently left to join Penguin Michael Joseph – also reporting to Phoebe Morgan. 

Kickstarting her career at independent publishing houses such as Feminist Press in New York, where she worked in the editorial team for six months, she then spent some time in academic publishing and completed an MA in Gender Studies before returning to trade publishing.

Since joining HarperFiction at the beginning of 2020, she has worked with authors including Jeffrey Archer, Cecelia Ahern, Dinah Jefferies and Mhairi McFarlane, and edited and published authors such as Sally Page and C J Cooke. She also acquired her own list of titles, predominantly in the rom-com space, bringing on board authors such as Niamh Hargan and Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone.