The Trustees

The Desmond Elliott Prize is administered by The Desmond Elliott Charitable Trust.

The trustees are:

Dallas Manderson (Chairman)
Christine Berry
Liz Thomson

Registered address: c/o Taylor Vinters, Merlin Place, Cambridge CB4 ODP.
Registered Charity Number 1115496

Dallas Manderson is Chairman of the trustees of The Desmond Elliott Charitable Trust and Group Sales Director of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd where he is responsible for Orion's sales throughout the world and represents the sales division on the board. He joined The Orion Publishing group Ltd in 1993 from Random House UK Ltd where he held the same position. He joined Century Publishing Ltd in 1983, which over ten years grew to become Random House UK Ltd. From 1983 to 1977 he was with Arlington Books Publishers Ltd where he started as Sales Manager and went on to become Sales and Marketing Director working for the late Desmond Elliott. His first job was as Sales Representative for Arms and Armour Press Ltd from 1977 to 1975 where his territory was the United Kingdom.

Christine Berry worked with Desmond Elliott at Arlington Books, initially as Desmond's assistant and later as a director, at the time when Dallas Manderson was sales and marketing director.  Dealing with contracts and negotiations for publishing rights led to an interest in legal matters. Christine left Arlington Books to read law at Cambridge University and she subsequently qualified as a solicitor.  She is now a partner in the charities group at Taylor Vinters, a Cambridge-based law firm. 

Liz Thomson is a founding Editor of BookBrunch, the online news service for publishing professionals. She has worked in the book trade for some 25 years, and was for many years on the staff of Publishing News. Having studied music at the University of Liverpool, she worked first in music publishing and, with David Gutman, is the co-editor of critical anthologies of writing on John Lennon, Bob Dylan and David Bowie; she was also a contributor to the last edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians. Her journalism, much of it about books and authors, has appeared in the Listener, New Statesman & Society, The Times, Standard, the Independent, and Mojo, and, in Australia, in the Bulletin; she is a contributor to the American journal Publishers Weekly. Liz has been a Visiting Fellow of the Open University’s Sixties Research Group and has lectured at Liverpool and Kingston universities; she has broadcast widely on radio and TV, both in Britain and abroad. 

The trustees - Dallas Manderson (Chairman), Christine Berry, Liz Thomson