Our team

Publishing team

Salt is an independent literary publisher, founded in 1999 and based in Cromer on the North Norfolk coast. We champion distinctive stories and poems, published with care. Over more than a quarter of a century, Salt titles have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and have won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize for New Writers, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the McKitterick Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Polari First Book Prize, the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Betty Trask Prize and the Arnold Bennett Book Prize, among many other national and international honours. In 2008 Salt was named Independent Publishing Innovation of the Year at the IPG Awards. Our books are distributed nationally by Macmillan and sold across Europe  through a dedicated international network.

Salt is run by a small team with more than fifty years' combined experience in publishing, editorial and communications.

Christopher Hamilton-Emery
Publisher

Chris co-founded Salt in 1999 and co-directs the press with Jen Hamilton-Emery. He was awarded the American Book Award in 2006 for services to American literature, and has served on the boards of the Independent Publishers Guild and Planet Poetry. He previously held senior roles in academic publishing at Cambridge University Press and Polity Press, and works occasionally as a consultant to the wider industry. A poet, he has published five full-length collections – most recently Wonder – and edited editions of John Keats, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, alongside an anthology of classic art and poems; he is also the author of 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell. He is the founder and senior designer of The Cover Factory, a book design consultancy serving the independent publishing sector. He lives in Cromer with Jen, a houseful of books and rather too many cats.

Jennifer Hamilton-Emery
Publisher

Jen is the founding director of Salt and leads the editorial programme, working directly with the press's authors from acquisition through to publication. She has overseen the acquisition and editing of more than a hundred novels, including Xan Brooks's The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, shortlisted for the The Costa First Novel Award in 2017, and Paul McVeigh's The Good Son, winner of The Polari Prize in 2017. Before founding Salt with Chris, she spent twenty years in senior management in the NHS, latterly as General Manager of Adult Mental Health Services at Suffolk Mental Health Trust. She holds an MA in Culture and Modernity and retains a continuing research interest in discourse analysis. Authors regularly remark on the handwritten notes – and the small packets of salt – that travel with every order out of the Cromer office.

Kirsty Hamilton-Emery
Publicity Manager

Kirsty leads publicity across Salt's lead and superlead titles, working with national press, broadcasters, festivals and booksellers to bring the press's authors to the widest possible readership. A first-class graduate in Journalism Studies from the University of Sheffield, she trained as a reporter on the Worksop Guardian and went on to work as a senior journalist at The Star in Sheffield, before a period as a communications officer with Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. She joined Salt in 2023 and brings a journalist's eye for the story to every campaign she runs.

Registered Office Address

Salt Publishing Limited

hoops.intervene.amplifier

Company No. 05293401
VAT Registration No. GB834881989
EORI No. GB834881989000
ISNI No. 0000 0000 9837 6153