Jamie Byng is the CEO of Canongate Books, the publishing house that he joined as a voluntary worker in 1992, and which celebrated its 50^th anniversary in 2023.

Born in June 1969, Byng was raised near Winchester before moving to Scotland to study English Literature at Edinburgh University.  During this time, he started Chocolate City, a funk, jazz, hip hop and reggae club, which he continued to run and deejay at until he was involved in a management buy-out of Canongate in 1994.

Canongate has twice been Publisher of the Year (2003 and 2009) as well as Independent Publisher of the year in 2020, and has grown into one of the UK’s most dynamic and successful independent publishers.  Amongst its notable hits are Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which was the biggest selling winner of the Man Booker Prize, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, and the Canongate Myths series (featuring books by Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith, David Grossman, Jeanette Winterson, AS Byatt and Alexander McCall Smith). Other notable authors include Matt Haig, Rick Rubin, Miranda July, Chloe Dalton, Lemn Sissay, Michel Faber, Ruth Ozeki, Ece Temelkuran and Omar El Akkad.

Canongate author Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note series of books was a key inspiration for Letters Live, an event format that Byng developed at Canongate in 2013 before setting it up as a separate company with Shaun Usher and SunnyMarch (Benedict Cumberbatch and Adam Ackland’s film and tv company) in 2015. He has since co-produced over seventy Letters Live shows.

Byng was also one of the founders and directors of World Book Night, a literacy initiative that saw one million books being given to one million people on one night in March 2011.

Byng has been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh and Dundee, has five children, still deejays regularly, and currently lives in East Sussex with his wife Silvie and their daughter Lyra. He regularly travels to London and Edinburgh, where Canongate remains headquartered.