Rebecca Strong
Publisher, Founder

With more than twenty years’ experience in U.K. and U.S. publishing, Rebecca has worked in senior editorial and licensing roles for leading independent presses and multinational publishing houses including Harvill, Bloomsbury, and Random House, New York.

In the U.S. she led the multi-million-dollar revenue generating licensing department for Crown, a division of Random House, selling commercial fiction, nonfiction, lifestyle, health, and business lists. She later set up her own boutique literary agency representing the Middle East bureau chiefs of the Times and New York Times.

In the U.K. she was approached to help launch the U.K.’s newest literary imprint dedicated to literature in translation, Mountain Leopard Press, which became part of Welbeck in March 2021.

Always curious and reaching across boundaries, in 2014 Rebecca retrained as a full-stack web developer becoming a software engineer for a New York consultancy whose tech clients included start-ups in the arts, entertainment, government, and non-profit green space spheres. Her heart never left the world of literature and publishing.

Rebecca is learning Scottish Gaelic.

Pene Parker
Creative Founder

Pene graduated from the Royal College of Art and is an award-winning publishing designer, brand and packaging designer, and stylist.

She is the former creative director of BBC Worldwide, where she worked across media platforms on the global publishing phenomena “Walking with Dinosaurs” and “The Blue Planet”, and was the creative director of leading international illustrated and lifestyle publishing house Octopus.

She has collaborated independently with author Rukmini Iyer on The Roasting Tin, a series of five bestselling cookery books.

Her publishing clients have included: BBC Books, Ebury, Headline, Mitchell Beazley, Quercus, Penguin Random House, Phaidon, Simon & Schuster and Square Peg.

Her food, fashion, lifestyle, business, advertising and television clients have included: Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dorset Cereals, Duchy Originals, Fortnum & Mason, Glenmorangie, Miller’s Ale, Nando’s, Observer Food Monthly, the Telegraph, and Raymond Blanc; Burberry, Crabtree & Evelyn for Peter Windett, Highgrove House, Historic Royal Palaces, and LWR Design; Two Blue and Stripe Communications; Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Black Sheep, Hoi Polloi, Kindred Agency, and Kream Communications; Sariel Heseltine and Wagon T.V.

Pene is learning Italian.

Gina Dobbs
Contracts Consultant

Based in Edinburgh, Gina is the former U.K. group contracts director for Penguin Random House and has worked for leading independent publisher Bloomsbury P.L.C. in addition to the literary agency Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

Colin Adams

Colin is the former group finance director of Bloomsbury Publishing P.L.C., the U.K.’s leading independent publisher. He was most recently the chief operating and finance officer for Quercus Publishing which was acquired by Hachette in 2014.

Susie Dunlop

Susie is the publisher of Allison & Busby, one of the U.K.’s celebrated independent publishing houses. With more than thirty years’ experience in sales and licensing, she is a former board member of the Independent Publishers Guild.