Michael Moynahan joins HarperCollins India Board

Sydney, 1 February 2010 MEDIA RELEASE

The Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins Australia and New Zealand, Michael Moynahan, will join the Board of Directors of HarperCollins India, it was announced today.

Victoria Barnsley, CEO and Publisher, HarperCollins UK and International, to whom Michael reports, said: “Michael’s extensive experience of the Indian market, gathered during his time as Managing Director of Random House, India, will bring an extra dimension to our business in India. In a tough environment globally, we can achieve a lot through working together across continents and, as Michael has demonstrated in a year as CEO of Australia and New Zealand, he is excellent at adapting global strategies to local markets.”

Michael Moynahan said: “India is such a wonderfully diverse market, with many challenges and opportunities. I am very much looking forward to working with Sukumar and the rest of the HarperCollins India team, which has taken great strides over the years, and to providing support for moving the business forwards.”

The UK export team will continue to work directly with colleagues in HarperCollins India, and Michael will be responsible for business affairs and for liaison between India and the rest of the global business at HarperCollins. His new additional role takes effect immediately.

Note to Editors:

HarperCollins India is a joint venture between the India Today Group and HarperCollins Publishers worldwide. This partnership brings together the dynamism and reach of one of India’s biggest media groups with the publishing experience and expertise of a premier international publishing company.

HarperCollins India has achieved phenomenal growth in the past few years and publishes fiction, non-fiction and poetry by diverse writers like Aravind Adiga, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Kamala Das, Kunal Basu, Tarun J. Tejpal, Deepak Chopra, Ruchir Joshi, Rana Dasgupta, Kiran Nagarkar, Meghnad Desai, Mukul Deva, Jaishree Misra, Pinki Virani and Anita Nair. It has also built a list of talented first-time writers, including Advaita Kala, Anuja Chauhan, Karan Bajaj, Jahnavi Achrekar, Amitabha Bagchi, Kishwar Desai, Pallavi Aiyer, Mathew Menacherry, H.M. Naqvi, Chandrahas Choudhury, Ameen Merchant, Captain Gopinath and Nirupama Subramanian. Harper Perennial, Fourth Estate, Collins Business, Harper Hindi and Harper Litmus are a few of HarperCollins India’s recently introduced imprints. The company also distributes HC books by writers such as Doris Lessing, Paulo Coelho, Agatha Christie, Jack Welch, Jack Higgins, Alistair Maclean, Ken Blanchard, Isaac Asimov, Isabel Allende, Michael Crichton, Sam Bourne, Tolkien, Cecelia Ahern, Andrew Gross and The Dalai Lama, as well as the world-renowned Collins Cobuild and Collins Gem Dictionaries.

HarperCollins India has been the recipient of several book prizes in the past year. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize; Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyer won the Vodaphone Crossword Readers Choice Award 2008 for the best book published in India in the year 2008 by an Indian writer; Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan was shortlisted for the Vodaphone Crossword Best Novel Award 2008 and was also longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize. India on Television by Nalin Mehta won the Most Outstanding Project in the Best Book / Best Writer on Asian Media category, while the marketing campaign for The White Tiger won the award for Excellence in the Best Use of Multimedia Marketing by a Book Publisher at the recent Asian Multimedia Publishing Awards 2009, in Manila.

About HarperCollins
HarperCollins, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, is a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NWS, NWSLV).

Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups around the world, including the HarperCollins General Books Group, HarperCollins Children’s Books Group, Zondervan, HarperCollins UK, HarperCollins Canada, HarperCollins Australia/New Zealand and HarperCollins India. HarperCollins is a broad-based publisher with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business books, children’s books, cookbooks, mystery, romance, reference, religious and spiritual books. With nearly 200 years of history, HarperCollins has published some of the world’s foremost authors and has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins is the first publisher to digitise its content and create a global digital warehouse to protect the rights of its authors, meet consumer demand and generate additional business opportunities.

You can visit HarperCollins Publishers on the internet at www.harpercollins.com.au