Luigi Bonomi.

After studying English literature at UCL and at Dartmouth College in the USA, Luigi became an editor at children’s publishers Macdonald Futura where he worked on the Enid Blyton estate. While there, he created one of the first Young Adult and Children’s publishing lists in the UK. Following this, he went on to work for romance publishers Harlequin Mills & Boon with some of the biggest international authors in the business, working in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. He went on to be hired by Penguin Books to become the editorial director of their commercial fiction and non-fiction list where he worked on authors like Nora Roberts, Jack Higgins, Peter James, and Alan Titchmarsh.

In 1994, Luigi decided to become a literary agent with Sheil Land Associates, before setting up his own literary agency, LBA, in 2005.  As an agent, he has represented well-known TV personalities such as Sir Terry Wogan, Richard Hammond, James May, Kirstie Allsopp, Fern Britton and Alan Titchmarsh, but also many crime and thriller writers as well as popular authors of serious non-fiction. He has been responsible for discovering and launching the careers of many bestselling writers, and in 2010, he was awarded the accolade and Bookseller Industry Award of Literary Agent of the Year.

In 2016, in association with the Daily Mail and Penguin Books, Luigi set up the Daily Mail, a bestselling author competition which has been hugely successful. He is an Honorary Professor of Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University and has worked as a consultant for the Oxford Literary Festival as well as run a successful competition with the Emirates Literary Festival, which has seen eight aspiring authors get their first book deal.