Warnick departs Mail on Sunday

Marilyn Warnick, long-serving Mail on Sunday books editor, handling serial rights, has stepped down from the role after 18 years. 

Warnick told The Bookseller: “I’m 69 and felt the need to step down and do more travelling and relaxing." She may still write features and review fiction, she said, but is "getting out of the day-to-day stress" and has plans to travel in South America and along the Silk Road.

An announcement on her replacement in the role is expected within the month, but no cuts to coverage are anticipated. Warnick said the newspaper was "100% committed" to its books content, with Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig, a former Sunday Times literary editor, "very, very interested in books".

Before joining the Mail on Sunday, Warnick was a bookseller at the Pan Bookshop, a publicist at Quartet, and then an editor at Quartet and Penguin, as well as on the boards of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature (for a decade) and Children’s Book Week.

She was features editor and in charge of book reviews at Good Housekeeping, then a serial buyer at the Daily Telegraph for eight years, before taking up the same role at the Mail on Sunday in 1999.   

"You don't spend 18 years at a company if you don't enjoy it, or don't enjoy that job," she said. "It's one foot in journalism and one in publishing - I could never decide which one I wanted to be in but managed to find a job that covered both."

However she vowed never to read a non-fiction book on Hitler or Churchill again. "In my 18 years [at the MoS] I have serialised four books by people who were in the bunker with Hitler alone - Hitler's secretary, Hitler's driver, Hitler's agitant... And I've seen two books for the autumn with 'previously undiscovered' material on Churchill.  You start thinking,'Is there anything new at all?'

"However today I got sent the new Robert Harris novel and you never get over that thrill of a book you can't wait to read."