IAN BIRCH
Agent: Juliet Pickering
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Ian Birch is an editor and writer who started his career at Time Out in the 70s when it had a radical voice and every staff member was paid the same. He moved into writing about music, first at Melody Maker, where he went on tour with The Clash to his hometown of Belfast, and then at Smash Hits, in the 1980s, where he became the unofficial sixth member of Duran Duran.
Since then, Ian has edited many publications in London and New York, including launching several ground-breaking magazines such as Grazia, Red, Heat and Closer. In the USA he edited Us magazine and re-launched the iconic weekly, TV Guide, in 2004, turning it from an analogue to a digital operation with an audience of 26 million.
He has worked as editorial director for Hearst magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, overseeing respected brands such as Harpers Bazaar, Esquire, Elle Decoration and Good Housekeeping. He is a contributor to Monocle radio.
Ian won the Mark Boxer Award for lifetime achievement at the British Society of Magazine Editors Awards – the magazine industry’s equivalent of an Oscar.
UNCOVERED
Non-Fiction, 256 pages
Cassell, October 2018
They made you look. They made you think. They made you care.
Now, in UNCOVERED, the editors, photographers, designers and muses behind the most iconic magazine covers reveal the discussions and decisions that led them to publish and be damned.
The media both reflects and shapes society, and today more than ever we are aware of the potential for the cover of a magazine to create ripples across the world; particularly with the advent of social media. In this book, the former editorial director of Hearst magazines in the UK, Ian Birch, takes a chronological look at the most impactful covers, and speaks to the people behind them to get the inside take on how they came to fruition.
Featuring interviews with photographers, their subjects, art directors, editors and designers involved in creating these ground-breaking covers, including exclusive interviews with Jann Wenner, Ian Hislop and Caitlyn Jenner on her now iconic Vanity Fair cover, Uncovered is an exciting look at how creative minds come together to create revolutionary covers.