Ruling the roost: Rachel Leyshon on Chicken House’s next chapter

Rachel Leyshon has known for some time that she would succeed Barry Cunningham to lead Chicken House, the Frome, Somerset-based “independently minded” division of Scholastic.

So, for many months she has been thinking about what the middle-grade and Young Adult specialist will look like when she takes over the reins on 1st January in something of a generational changing of the guard; Cunningham, deputy managing director Rachel Hickman and rights director Elinor Bagenal – all of whom have been at Chicken House since its inception in 2000 – are retiring at the end of December (I imagine there will be one hell of a leaving do).

Leyshon has been an editorial director at Chicken House since 2011 so she frames the publisher’s next chapter in the context of her current role. She says: “When people think of editing, they think slash, burn and cut. But it’s more a reshaping of the story. So that’s how I am thinking about 2026 and beyond. I want to retain Chicken House’s core: we will absolutely continue to be a purely fiction list, in ages seven to 17. We are a house that has always supported new talent, proper writing talent and that kind of authenticity is really important to me. But we’ve been thinking very hard about different formats, different lengths, different voices and how to better get straight to the reader.”

Leyshon and I meet in Chicken House’s offices in Frome’s cobbled centre, a part of the market town which, with its quirky indie shops and smart eateries, London journalists invariably call “trendy” after visiting for an afternoon – or, more likely, whizzing through Google Street View – to file yet-another 10 Coolest Places to Live in Britain piece. Leyshon has just returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) where conversations with international colleagues around playing with format and word counts were driven home by the rights success of author/illustrator Holly Surplice’s The Horse Dreamer, which has been sold into eight territories. Published in the UK on 9th October, it is also becoming Chicken House’s autumn 2025 hit.

Leyshon says: “[The Horse Dreamer] is a very short book, beautifully illustrated. It is in that young middle-grade area and kind of gives us ideas about where readers are and how tastes have changed.” Here, Leyshon motions to the groaning bookshelves to her left, which feature some of the publisher’s biggest hits since launch, including Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (2004), Chicken House’s first blow-the-doors-off bestseller. “Some of [Funke’s] earlier books are absolutely huge, but readers are after slimmer titles now. You will always still have those readers who want to read chunky books, but the market is changing.”

That leads to a discussion of middle-grade in general. Leyshon says: “It’s no secret that there has been a big decline in reading in the eight-to-12s, which is concerning because it is an age range that has not just been a mainstay of children’s publishing, but I would argue is a building block for all of publishing. We can guess the reasons: long-term effects from the pandemic, the distraction of phones… graphic novels are very big in this age range now, but we’re not going to do that. Comics are Scholastic’s thing and as a small team we have to be focused on what we do best. But, again, there are some of our evergreen stories that suit a different format, which can tap into [the shifting middle-grade market].”

When people think of editing, they think slash, burn and cut. But it’s more a reshaping of the story. So that’s how I am thinking about 2026 and beyond.

Part of Leyshon’s FBF was the first IRL meeting with her new boss, Jackie De Leo, who came over to Scholastic US from Barnes & Noble to the new role of publisher and chief merchant after an organisational shake-up when Ellie Berger, who ran the trade division for 40 years, retired in June. Chicken House was bought by Scholastic in 2005 as an independent part of the American group, though naturally it also partners with Scholastic UK. Leyshon says the relationship with its parent group is “the best of both worlds. I like being in this creative, bohemian bolthole in Somerset and [Scholastic] pretty much lets us carry on doing what we do. But because we can also tap into the buzz and support of London and New York we get to have these conversations about what more we can do to connect with different markets across the world”.

Leyshon spent the early part of her life in Ballygally, a picturesque Northern Ireland town on the Antrim coast before her family moved to Bridgend in Wales (“no one in school could understand my Irish accent”). She studied English and music at Birmingham and after working in France post-graduation came back to Britain thinking to get into publishing, partly inspired by one of her English teachers at school, Cary Archard, the founder of Welsh indie Seren Books. She saw an advert for a literary assistant at Sheil Land and, to her astonishment, got the job.

That led to editorial roles at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first on the literary side followed by a move to commercial fiction. The latter would prove good training when Leyshon switched from adult to kids’: “Commercial taught me to work with authors about how the story served the reader. With literary – and I was very junior so wasn’t working directly with many authors – it was a lot of worrying about whether you could insert one ellipsis in an Edna O’Brien book.”

The jump to children’s, and Chicken House, came out of a lifestyle switch. She moved to Bath to start a family, in the days when working outside London was not the done thing, so started freelance editing. She says: “I just started saying ‘no’ to adult books as I found the collaboration on children’s much more exciting.” After freelancing for Chicken House, she was brought in permanently. There she has shepherded some of its biggest hits to market, including Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s multi-prize winner A Girl of Ink and Stars (still by far Chicken House’s biggest seller), MG Leonard’s Beetle Boy and Maz Evans’ Who Let the Gods Out? That she worked with these authors at the start, or very early on in their careers, has been special: “You remember every book and every author that you’ve worked with in different ways. But finding authors and seeing them through to great successes, that’s the biggest satisfaction.”

Cunningham is not going entirely away as he will continue to run Chicken House Entertainment, the publisher’s sister IP company. Leyshon appreciates he will still be around  (in what I believe is a legal requirement in every story mentioning Cunningham, I will note that among his many discoveries, he was the original acquirer of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). Leyshon says: “Barry has probably been the ultimate publishing influencer and has been a great mentor to me. And one of the things I’ve learned from him is creativity is best done in collaboration. And we will continue to do that with our team, with our authors. The coming years are a new edit of Chicken House, but even in this AI-influenced, post-truth world we’ll still be a rock of authenticity.”