About Nicolette Jones

Nicolette Jones is a writer, journalist, critic and occasional broadcaster (presenting, for instance, Archive on 4: The American Art Tapes). She has been the children’s books reviewer of the Sunday Times for decades, has been nominated for the Eleanor Farjeon Award for outstanding service to the world of children’s books, and in 2022 was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her book The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea (Little, Brown/Abacus), was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and won two maritime literature prizes. She since instigated regular commemorations of Samuel Plimsoll in Folkestone, and a campaign for a memorial, now a mural by Shane Record on the Fishing Museum, as well as a national Plimsoll Day fundraiser for the RNLI. Her book is the basis of a forthcoming Sandstone documentary and a new edition, with a new Foreword, has been published for the bicentenary of Plimsoll’s birth in February 2024.

She has collected and annotated a ‘commonplace book’, Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow, 2022).

The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth-Century Art by John Jones and Nicolette Jones (Tate Publishing, 2021) is her tribute to a year in the 1960s in which her father interviewed more than 100 US artists, and it includes 20 edited interviews with artists from Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono. See also her website www.johnedwardjones.co.uk for more about the work of John Jones.

She has written two books about the illustrator/author Raymond Briggs; the more recent is The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson 2020; also out in Italy, Taiwan, Korea and China), and she was co-curator of the House of Illustration’s 2021-4 touring Briggs exhibition (The Arc Winchester, Kirkcudbright Galleries, Bowes Museum, Cambridge University Library and Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft.)

Collaborating with the ‘Glasses in Classes’ charity campaign, she assembled in 2020 a global anthology of children’s stories and illustrations, Through the Looking Glasses: Stories About Seeing Clearly (free online).

And she has edited a collection, The Velveteen Rabbit and Other Classic Children’s Stories, which will be published on 11 September 2025 by Macmillan Collector’s Library.

She has also worked for The Sunday Times and Channel Four on multi-media children’s book supplements and selections. See also Publications page.

Jones is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, tutored academic writing at University College London and at Kings College London, and is now an RLF Bridge Writing Fellow for sixth formers online.

A professional chair of literary events, she has appeared at festivals for many years (particular favourites have been Charleston and Cheltenham). Her hundreds of interviewees have included Martin Amis, Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, Joan Bakewell, Malorie Blackman, Marcus Brigstocke, Vince Cable, Lauren Child, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Richard Ford, Maggi Hambling, Elizabeth Jane Howard, John Humphrys, Erica Jong, Judith Kerr, Michael Morpurgo, Terry Pratchett, Michael Rosen, Salman Rushdie and Emma Thompson …

During the Sunday Times’s sponsorship of the Oxford Literary Festival, she was Director of the Festival’s children’s programme, and instigated and directed (for seven years) the St Hilda’s College Writers Day at the Festival.

Jones has written for all the broadsheet papers and for the book trade press. She currently also writes a regular feature about children’s book illustration for the online specialist journal Books for Keeps. She is an experienced book prize judge, and a seasoned trustee and committee chair (including of Booktrust’s Lifetime Achievement Award), and involved in a number of literary, charitable and social initiatives. Since 19 March 2024 she posts a #NewIllustrationoftheDay every day on social media. A signatory to Authors4Oceans, a Special Advisor to Empathy Lab, and a Friend of the Story Museum in Oxford, she is also delighted to have been an honorary member of the Royal Naval Reserve Officers’ Dining Club.

Originally from Leeds, she grew up in an artist’s family. She studied at Oxford University, has had a long, active association with St Hilda’s College, and went to Yale University on a graduate scholarship as a Henry Fellow. She is married to writer and journalist Nicholas Clee, and they have two daughters. She lives in London where she sees a lot of theatre, and where, pre-pandemic, she was known as a local community activist.

Bluesky: @nicolettejones.bsky.social

Instagram: @nicolettejonesig

More information

Written or edited by Nicolette Jones:

With contributions by Nicolette Jones: