‘The Letters Page informs how I go about my day-to-day work’: A Conversation with Harriet Dunlea, Head of Books at Carver PR 

By Anna Hughes

Edited by Annabel Wearring-Smith

When Harriet outlined the stepping stones of her early publishing career, she described its trajectory as ‘very much Letters Page, internship, assistant role’. 

All Zoom meetings start with a slight pause as the microphone connects, and a relief when you can see each other on-screen and hear each other clearly. This was the only pause in my conversation with Harriet Dunlea, as we talked about university, The Letters Page and all things publishing. 

Harriet worked as a student on The Letters Page in 2015, and is now Head of Books at Carver PR. She remembers learning about The Letters Page in a lecture and ‘feeling really, really happy when I got it because it was tangible experience that I get to do in Nottingham, where there aren’t that many opportunities to do publishing work experience.’ 

She was online editor, developing the blog that has grown alongside The Letters Page all these years. Harriet said, ‘with The Letters Page, it just kind of gave me a bit of a reprieve’, where ‘I was able to do something different and practical, and obviously working with Jon is great, but also working collaboratively as a team was very valuable.’ 

The Letters Page launched Harriet into her successful and exciting career in publishing, acting as a ‘brilliant thing on my CV that made me stand out when I then applied for the Penguin Random House summer internship scheme’ and she ‘was able to stress The Letters Page in my application’. Penguin Random House continues to run its own summer internship scheme, in an eight week format across a range of departments, as well as two-week work experience placements.  

Harriet completed a ten-week internship in the Cornerstone division, at the same time as when they published Harper Lee’s long-awaited Go Set a Watchman, ‘a huge moment in the literary world.’ 

She told me how during the same ten-week scheme, ‘We had Sebastian Faulks come into the office to celebrate his new book’ and ‘I literally thought it’s absolutely bizarre that I was there.’ This internship was only the very beginning of a long list of career highlights that I was eager to hear about. 

Her first assistant job was at Andersen Press, perhaps best known for publishing David McKee, the creator of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. Harriet described the joy of working at an indie publisher where ‘only sixteen people worked in that company doing everything from editorial to production to rights, and it meant that I overheard all of the conversations. We didn’t have a meeting room, everything was happening in the middle of that office, and it was very practical publishing experience.’ During this time, Harriet told me how she ‘used to tour with Julian Clary, the comedian. He did a series of children’s books, and he used to take this really hilarious stand-up show to schools’. She emphasised the immense opportunities within a small team at an indie publisher, and the amount she learnt during her time at Andersen. 

Harriet said ‘then I moved to Scholastic because I wanted to get a little bit more commercial experience under my belt and I ended up staying for five years’, working on a variety of different campaigns across YA and Middle Grade Fiction.  

When I asked her for a career standout, she said that winning the Publishers Publicity Circle Award for her campaign for Helen Rutter’s The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh ‘was a total highlight’. ‘It’s about a little boy who has a stammer who wants to be a comedian, but can’t get his jokes out, and it’s based on Helen’s 12-year-old son, Lenny. He was able to join his mum for interviews. I was able to get really interesting interviews that I had never been able to secure before and it meant that my press portfolio grew massively during that time.’ 

She told me how ‘the author was brilliant to work with and her whole family’ and how ‘you don’t hear people with stammers on broadcast, and that felt really new’. Waterstones went on to select the book as Children’s Book of the Month. 

Harriet took on her new role as Head of Books at Carver PR in January this year, with the PR agency launching a new dedicated books division. She told me that she still draws on her experience from The Letters Page. ‘When I was at The Letters Page, I had to interact with writers and authors. And those early lessons have really informed how I go about my day-to-day job. I am in constant contact with creatives and writers.’ 

Before I finished chatting with Harriet, I wanted to learn as much as I could from her and asked how myself and other students working at The Letters Page could make the most of the experience. She told me to embrace the opportunity to attend events and how ‘it’s really important to turn up because you don’t know who you’re going to meet’. She told me that ‘there’s a lot of people that go through uni who don’t leave their uni bubble. And actually, The Letters Page was a really important vehicle for me to do that’.  

As I attend our Wednesday meeting in the office this week, I notice the industry insight it offers me amidst my studies, the chance to connect with authors and publishing professionals like Harriet, and the feeling of stepping beyond this university bubble. I ended the zoom call incredibly inspired by Harriet. Standing in the same place that she was at the start of her career, I felt excited by our conversation and all the future possibilities that could follow my time here at The Letters Page. 

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