Name: Claire Murdoch
Role: Head of Publishing
Company: Penguin Random House New Zealand
My role on the PANZ Council is: Training and development. I’m keen to make sure what we offer suits what our industry looks like right now: lots of people doing LOTS of work; only some of them in traditional full-stack publishing houses like ours; career pathways in publishing and on-the-job learning opportunities not at all what they used to be; uncertainty the only certain.
My first job in publishing was: Depends whether you count years spent writing embarrassing stories with my best friend, the gopher role at the Dominion newspaper circa the death of Princess Di, or getting to be Publishing Assistant to the late, great John Iremonger at Allen & Unwin in Sydney in the early 2000s.
I’m currently reading: Manuscripts, three-month-old New Yorkers, Motherhood by Sheila Heti, the new Patti Smith (sigh), the deservedly successful This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman and a little Lee Child, for the first time ever—plus, audiobooks and Jia Tolentino.
