Sarah Shaffi is a journalist, editor and interviewer, among many other things, with more than a decade of experience working at newspapers, magazines and websites.

As a freelance writer, Sarah has bylines at Stylist, Phoenix, Penguin.co.uk, The New Arab and more. She specialises in books, but also writes about politics, race, and pop culture (and the intersection of all three).

She regularly chairs events with authors, and has interviewed Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo, poet Nikita Gill, and authors Jojo Moyes, Candice Carty-Williams and Liane Moriarty, among others, in front of live audiences. She’s a regular interviewer at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Southbank Centre and Asia House Literature Festival.

Sarah has been on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row a number of times, talking about everything from fan fiction to the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, as well as appearing on Front Row Late on BBC Two, and has been featured on Claudia Winkleman’s BBC Radio 2 show Claudia on Sunday multiple times to give book recommendations. She’s also been on Monocle and as a guest on the podcasts Down the Rabbit Hole and the Papertrail Podcast.

Sarah has been a judge for a number of literary prizes, including the Jhalak Prize for Best Book by a Writer of Colour. She is a judge for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020.

Sarah also has experience with project managing websites. She worked on commissioning and writing content and building Penguin Random House’s How to Get Published website, and project managed the redesign of The Bookseller’s website.

Sarah worked at The Bookseller, the trade magazine for the British publishing industry, from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, she became the first person of colour to edit an issue of the magazine. While at The Bookseller, she also worked on the redesign of the magazine’s website, and on the British Book Industry Awards, where she was deputy chair of the Books of the Year strand.

Get in touch with Sarah here.