‘Loos, queues and brews’: Emma Lowe is ready to usher in a new-and-improved LBF
The London Book Fair director talks about making big moves, building relationships and how human connection can help to sell books.
Running an international book fair has a lot of moving parts, and doing it well requires someone who can juggle logistics and diplomacy, be as comfortable talking to celebs and CEOs as they are with contractors and be a long-term strategist and a quick-on-the-feet short-term problem solver. True, says Emma Lowe, who will oversee her first London Book Fair (LBF) when Olympia’s doors open in just under a fortnight’s time – but she stresses that “my main job boils down to the nitty-gritty: it’s loos, queues and brews”.
We meet at the Level 10 café at the Tate Modern on a regrettably foggy day, with the St Paul’s cupola barely visible across the Thames. When Lowe arrives, she shows she can juggle, simultaneously winding up a meeting on her ear buds, greeting me and buying us hot chocolates. A pause for a full disclosure note: Lowe was once of this chapel, and my colleague for nine years. So I have seen her ably multi-task before. Once, she chaired a Zoom meeting and for a half an hour in the middle of it – without pausing or missing a beat – got up from her desk and conducted the school run.
The point about “loos, queues and brews” comes amid a segue where we talk about Zohran Mamdani – not entirely off-topic, as we were discussing US exhibitor numbers (the Americans are “back in force”). We decide that, despite all his socialist ideals, the New York City mayor will ultimately be judged by Big Apple residents on whether the garbage is collected and if the subway runs on time. Relevant here because, as Lowe explains: “Sure, a good bit of my time is about, say, reshaping the professional programme or meeting with people from the trade. But a lot is about making sure there are enough toilets for exhibitors, that people can get through security quickly and that there is easy access to a cup of coffee. At 9am on [LBF’s opening day] there’ll be about 15,000 people coming through security and it is endless conversations with Olympia and our contractors before navigating that smoothly.”
The biggest challenge has been the venue and Olympia’s renovations, which have created cramped conditions and, more concerning, debris falling from the ceiling into parts of the International Rights Centre (IRC) at last year’s fair. This led to Lowe’s first big decision, a shift, beginning in LBF 2027, to east London’s Excel. This was not a surprise to most exhibitors, as Lowe had been talking about it for about six months – first to the LBF advisory board, then on a charm offensive in meetings with publishers, trade bodies and agencies, plus running frequent visits to Excel for potential exhibitors.
“My job is being a fixer, but there are some things I can’t fix about Olympia,” Lowe says. “I can’t fix the number of loos we’ll have available. I can’t fix the number of concession points. I can’t fix that we lost 8,000 square metres of space, the size of the Grand Hall, and we’ll never get that back. I know people remember the last time [LBF’s somewhat disastrous 2006 at Excel] but this is not the same Excel. The transport is better, the food is better, and we’ll get to pick our own carpet.” (The last point is tongue-in-cheek but not quite a joke: it references the shocking yellow carpet at that Excel LBF 20 years ago, which many complained about.)
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Olympian task
Undoubtedly Olympia-related, LBF 2026 has had some dropouts. Canongate announced it would not be taking its usual stand but setting up shop in a local café. There have been a handful of other, more discreet non-exhibitors, including transatlantic behemoth WME, which will not take its typical complement of tables in the IRC (though its staff will be attending the show and the agency is throwing its usual fair-opening bash in central London).
“It is a disappointment,” Lowe says about the no-shows. “I’m fond of [Jamie Byng], I really like [Canongate publisher and commercial director] Jenny [Fry]; it’s a shame they aren’t coming to play. But I didn’t panic, as the conversation is bigger than one year, and it is about long-term relationships LBF needs to have with publishers and agencies. Look, [those not exhibiting] are all still coming, they’re just not in the hall. We have to get them back in the tent. I took Jamie to Excel a week or so ago and he was full of ideas, he’s exactly the kind of energy we want at the fair. And if we can’t accommodate that kind of energy, we’re not doing our jobs properly.”
A significant task has been making sure those inside the hall are informed, thus a reshaping of the professional programme. Though, the first principle starts (again) with managing queues. Last LBF had a waiting-in-line system outside of the seminars, which made cramped aisles more crowded. That has been dispensed with, and a reshuffle of the IRC and the stages, Lowe believes, will have the double benefit of making the agents’ space self-contained and the seminars more accessible.
There are the usual CEO chats, featuring turns from Penguin Random House UK’s Tom Weldon, Pan Macmillan’s Joanna Prior and Audible’s Bob Carrigan. New wrinkles include an inaugural narrator of the fair (Ray Porter), a huge tranche on books-to-screen, a first inclusion and accessibility hub and a “heavy ministerial presence” largely tied into the National Year of Reading. Lowe says that if there is an overarching theme to the programme, it is “about how the industry can reach the readers where they are. That, of course, means film, TV, video games, audio. But I use this example a lot: a person’s first experience with the Gruffalo might not be with the book, but a theme park ride. So, how can we reach those readers when that is their starting point?”
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Poacher and gamekeeper
When Lowe officially opens the show, she reckons it will be “conservatively, my 70th” international book fair. A marketing role at LBF was her first proper job after studying Italian and French at the University of Bath, and spending a year in Florence followed by another in Paris post-graduation. She “completely fell into” LBF as she was looking for something in events and finished her first LBF tour as group sales manager. At The Bookseller, she was director of publisher relations, which included having a big hand in making the Nibbies what they are today. She then moved to publishing e-commerce firm Glassboxx before switching to head of events at HarperCollins. A commonality of all these roles is at least part of each revolved around book fairs, on both sides – she has sold stands, she has set them up.
She has also been a book trade insider, something that her Nottingham Forest manager-esque succession of predecessors (Lowe is the fourth LBF director since 2022) were not. Does that help? “It’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing, and I can say this for our whole team, is that we are plugged in and can think about what publishing really needs. And we understand the nuances; my predecessors might not have quite understood why it is so important to get the IRC absolutely right so those 30-minute back-to-backs can happen. But I do feel the weight of expectation. Since I’ve taken this on, so many have said: ‘Oh, it’s so nice we finally have somebody from publishing.’ Which is nice. But it also means: ‘Don’t fuck it up.’”
Still, she is optimistic for 2026, and beyond: “I get asked a lot now about the future of book fairs. Yes, we are all on 101 Teams calls or Zooms a day, but you and I are talking face-to-face now because you often get a better result if people are present. And if we want to be producing the best books in the future, that presence and human connection has to continue – and that’s why book fairs are important.”
