Bloomsbury Publishing

Bloomsbury Publishing was founded in 1986 by Nigel Newton in London, with its head office on Bedford Square in the Bloomsbury district of Camden. For much of its early life it was a small player in the British market. That changed in 1997, when the company took a bet on a children's novel that had been passed up by several other houses. The Harry Potter series went on to reshape the company's fortunes, and Bloomsbury remains its originating publisher and custodian. In 1994 the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange, and it now sits in the FTSE 250. A US branch opened in New York in 1998, and since then Bloomsbury has added offices in Oxford, New Delhi, and Sydney.

The list spans adult and children's fiction, non-fiction, and a substantial academic division. Bloomsbury US publishes general-interest and academic titles, and in recent years the company has expanded its academic portfolio through the acquisition of ABC-CLIO in 2021 and Rowman & Littlefield in 2024. Within the Academic division the company publishes under several historic imprint names alongside its own.

Among the authors on the WebToTell list, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi won the Women's Prize for Fiction, and both Elif Shafak and Samantha Shannon publish with Bloomsbury US. Clarke's earlier novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is also part of the list. The publisher's roster stretches from the literary to the scholarly, from debut voices to Nobel and Pulitzer laureates.

A reader who lands on Bloomsbury through one of these titles will find a house that is as comfortable with a speculative fantasy epic as it is with a tightly wrought literary novel or a peer-reviewed monograph. The common thread is editorial ambition. The company built its reputation on finding authors that the larger groups passed on, and on seeing them through to the end.