Jamie Byng

James Edmund Byng (born 27 June 1969) is a British publisher. He works for the independent publishing firm Canongate Books, where he is the CEO and publisher.

Early life Byng grew up in the village of Abbots Worthy in Hampshire, England. The second son of the 8th Earl of Strafford and his first wife Jennifer May, he is a brother of the author Lady Georgia Byng, and through his stepfather, Sir Christopher Bland (the former chairman of the BBC, British Telecom and Royal Shakespeare Company), he is the half-brother of Archie Bland, print journalist and former deputy editor of The Independent.

Education and family Byng was educated at Winchester College, an independent boarding-school for boys in the cathedral city of Winchester in Hampshire, Southern England, followed by the University of Edinburgh. While attending the university, he ran a funk, reggae, and rare groove night club named "Chocolate City" (after the Parliament classic) at The Venue with his first wife, Whitney McVeigh, with whom he has two children – a daughter Marley and son Leo. Whitney McVeigh is the daughter of a socialite mother and her father is an American banker. with whom he has two children, Ivy and Nathaniel. Byng separated from Sheinkman in 2016 and married Silvia Gimenez Varela in 2021 and they have one child.

Publishing career After graduating, he convinced Scottish publisher Stephanie Wolfe Murray to give him a job at Canongate, then a respected but still somewhat marginalised Scottish company founded in 1973, which he joined as an intern. When Canongate was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1994, Byng, then in his mid-20s, instigated a buyout, aided by his business partner Hugh Andrew, his stepfather (former BBC chairman Sir Christopher Bland) and then father-in-law (co-chairman of the multinational investment bank Salomon Smith Barney). an event in which on 5 March 2011 (following World Book Day on 3 March) one million books – 40,000 copies of each of 25 carefully selected titles – were given away to members of the public in the UK and Ireland. It entailed 20,000 "givers" each distributing 48 copies of their chosen title to whomever they chose.