About

Martin Pick (b 1944) was for 27 years a publisher and for 17 years a literary agent before retiring in 2012.

Aged 18 Martin spent a year on Voluntary Service Overseas in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1962-63 helping to start a community centre and library. Following this experience, and a year reading history at King’s London, Martin read economic history and sociology  at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 1967. During that time he started VOLS, a project to start small libraries where VSO volunteers were working, and crowdfunded  a scholarship at UEA for a black South African to study there. He then spent five years in India and Pakistan in five cities working as an editor and manager for the Oxford University Press. The Pakistan period was overshadowed by the civil war which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. He has travelled regularly to India, where his sister and her family live, for nearly 50 years.

After working for two other large British publishers, Longman and Macmillan, he started his own company, Belitha Press, in 1980 which published children’s illustrated non-fiction books for international markets. He developed that for 14 years while also initiating various television projects for Channel 4 during the 1980s, from the history of immigration into the UK, Passage to Britain, co-producing The Raj through Indian Eyes and producing The Last Navigator about traditional navigation in the far Pacific.

In 1994 he became a literary agent, working with his father for six years and then on his own after his father’s death until 2013, principally on the literary estate of Wilbur Smith, the fiction writer.

For 25 years he was a school governor in London, undertook a training in couples counselling, was for 8 years a Council member of Minority Rights Group International and Chair of its publications committee, Chair of City and Hackney Mind, the mental health charity, for 6 years, a trustee of Peace Child International for 6 years, and of the Savile Club, where he organises and oversees the events programme.

In 2001 he initiated the Charles Pick Fellowship at UEA in memory of his father, a lifelong publisher. This provides fellowships for unpublished writers to shape their first books. He is currently assisting the university as an ambassador in South Asia, including Burma, after the award of an Hon D Litt in 2013.

Martin has been married for 40 years to his wife, Rachel, a psychotherapist, and has a daughter, Kath, a director of BBC arts programmes, and a son, Oliver, a primary school teacher.