about sort of books

The smallest publisher (by far) to win the Booker Prize

Sort of Books is an independent publishing venture by Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz. Our list includes acclaimed authors such as Shehan Karunatilaka, whose The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the 2022 Booker Prize, the Folio Prize winner Michelle de Kretser, whose novel Theory & Practice is our lead title in 2025, and Chris Stewart, whose Driving Over Lemons series has sold more than two million copies. We publish novels by Tove Jansson, Lore Segal, Jonathan Buckley and Tom Bullough, the nature essays of Kathleen Jamie, and all the original Moomin books.

We set up Sort Of in 1999 mainly to help our friend Chris Stewart launch his debut book, Driving Over Lemons, which became a surprise UK bestseller. Fired by its success, we have hand-picked three or four titles each year since. These have included four further Chris Stewart titles, nine remarkable works of fiction that Moomins creator Tove Jansson wrote for adults, most notably The Summer Book, which has now sold nearly 200,000 copies. We also publish beautiful hardback editions of the original Moomin novels, restored to their original 1950s and 1960s designs.

Our books have won numerous prizes. As well as Shehan’s Booker Prize, Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines was awarded both the prestigious John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Award, and Robert Kunzig’s Mapping the Deep, telling the extraordinary story of oceanography, won the Aventis Science Book of the Year award.

Finally, we are delighted to keep in print Peter Blegvad’s unique Leviathan – a genre-defying comic strip collection of wordplay, puns and ideas. We love this book and owe Peter a debt, having called our company Sort Of after the first record he made with his band, Slapp Happy. Which you can hear here.

Sort Of Books are edited by Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham, supported by two outstanding designers – Peter Dyer (covers) and Henry Iles (text) – and by independent publicist Ruth Killick.

In short, we publish the sort of books we feel proud of.

SORT OF BOOKS are represented by Profile Books and the Independent Alliance/Faber. PR is handled by Ruth Killick Publicity. Our foreign rights are handled by Andrew Nurnberg Associates and our American rights by George Lucas at Inkwell Management.