He has published some of the biggest books of the past 25 years — from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections to Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winners. Yet that was not enough to keep Nicholas Pearson at the helm of Fourth Estate, the imprint owned by HarperCollins, as the winds of change sweep publishing.
Pearson, whose redundancy this month has shocked the industry, is not alone: Philip Gwyn Jones exited Picador in July; Rachel Cugnoni left Vintage Books last September; and Alan Samson moved on from Weidenfeld & Nicolson a year ago. The shift started with the retirement of Dan Franklin from Jonathan Cape in 2019, after 26 years at the Vintage imprint.
