Clive Priddle will step down as publisher of PublicAffairs on September 13, after 21 years with the nonfiction imprint. The search for his successor will begin next month.
Priddle joined PublicAffairs in 2003 as executive editor, succeeding Paul Golob. He was promoted to editorial director in 2006 and publisher in 2012. At the imprint, he has edited such authors as Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Richard Haass, John Kerry, Kishore Mahbubani, Linda Robinson, David Rothkopf, Natan Sharansky, and Muhammad Yunus. Priddle is also oversees Bold Type Books, an imprint of PublicAffairs, which is a partnership between HBG and the journalism nonprofit Type Media Center.
PublicAffairs was launched in 1997 by Peter Osnos. It has been part of the Hachette Book Group since 2016, when HBG acquired Perseus Books Group, and is now an imprint of the Basic Books Group.
"During his long career at PublicAffairs, Clive has grown the imprint in an increasingly cosmopolitan direction," said Basic Books Group SVP and publisher Lara Heimert in a statement. "PublicAffairs began with a focus on Washington and American politics but has, under his guidance, published incredibly important books on regions ranging from Russia to Indonesia, China to Sudan."
"His many successes," Heimert continued, "include Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, about war in the Congo, and Victor Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, about the CIA’s covert program of killing activists in Indonesia and around the world. He has also built up a stellar list in economics, including Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, both by the Nobel Prize-winners Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. And under his leadership, Bold Type Books published the New York Times-bestseller Stamped from the Beginning, winner of the National Book Award, by Ibram Kendi."
Prior to PublicAffairs, Priddle served as publishing director of the U.K.-based Fourth Estate Books, a division of HarperCollins. At Fourth Estate, he helped launch the publisher's stateside imprint and acquired such authors as Geraldine Brooks, David Ewing Duncan, Laura Hillenbrand, Sebastian Junger, Eric Larson, Oliver Morton, James Naughtie, Francis Wheen, and Michela Wrong. Previously, he worked for four years at Penguin UK.
