BYNG, Hon. James Edmund

Publisher, Canongate Books Ltd, since 1994; b 27 June 1969; s of 8th Earl of Strafford, qv; m 1994, Whitney Osborn McVeigh (marr. diss. 2004); one s one d; partner, Elizabeth Sheinkman. Educ: Winchester Coll.; Edinburgh Univ. (BA). FRSA. Recreations: cooking, deejaying, drinking, feuding with literary agents, tennis.

THIRTEEN years ago Jamie Byng was working unpaid as a publicist at the ailing Edinburgh publisher Canongate. Today the firm has a turnover of millions, employs 23 staff — compared with seven when he joined — and is the first Scottish publisher to have walked away with the Man Booker Prize. Byng, 35, looks back at the past decade with the pride of a man who knows he is responsible for saving a Scottish institution, for its remarkable turnaround followed his purchase of the company aged 25.

Byng, who had fallen in love with Edinburgh during his four years at its university, remembers walking though Canongate’s doors and imbibing the excitement of publishing. As a boy he had wanted to be a tennis player. Later he ran reggae club nights in Edinburgh. Now he realised that publishing was his vocation. Canongate’s owner, Stephanie Wolfe Murray, at first reluctant to take on another work experience recruit, was persuaded by his gift of chocolates.

But the firm, started in 1973 by Stephanie and her then husband Angus, was in trouble. “It was hand to mouth and that makes it hard because there is no time or head space to plan ahead,” Byng recalls. “One thing I’ve learnt in the last ten years is how important it is to plan.” By 1994, when it went into receivership, it had changed hands three times. Byng realised that someone could pick it up for a song.

It is here that having both the sort of father and stepfather who had made it into Who’s Who helped. Jamie, the second son of the Earl of Strafford, was well connected. His stepfather, Christopher Bland, chairman of BT and a former chairman of LWT and the BBC, agreed to put in some money. The parents of his wife, Whitney, and his business partner Hugh Andrew, were also persuaded to help with the management buy-out.

“We were not talking about a huge amount of money but the thing about Christopher is that if you do manage to convince, he really will back you. When he became my stepfather when I was 12 he said that his job was to make my life interesting not easy. He denies ever saying it but it is such an excellent line I am sure he did.”

Byng set about transforming Canongate, informed by his worm’s eye view of the company. “What you need in publishing,” he concluded, “is a sense of fearlessness.”

Although Canongate had published such revolutionary works as Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, it had acquired a reputation for staidness. Byng launched two new imprints, Rebel Ink, devoted to counter-cultural writing, and Payback, centring on black American authors, both of which helped to change perceptions. Canongate reestablished itself as a publisher based in Scotland that would print good writing from anywhere. It published Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential , in Britain, Laura Hird’s Born Free, nominated for the Whitbread first novel award, and Kevin Williamson’s pro-drug polemic Drugs and the Party Line. It even managed to sell 900,000 copies of a series of extracts from the Bible with introductions by big names such as Bono and A.S. Byatt.

A further breakthrough came in 2002 with Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize and has sold 1.8 million copies.

He is determined to resist selling Canongate. “Having worked for ten years for myself and among like-minded, independent souls, I think I am bordering on the unemployable.

“Together we have forged a very strong identity and attitude. To somehow stop that from continuing would be an act bordering on the criminal.”

ANDREW BILLEN

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