Nicolette Jones is a writer and freelance journalist who has worked for national newspapers and the book trade press. Specialising in literary and arts journalism, she is the children’s books reviewer for The Sunday Times, a trustee of Read (The Reading Agency), the library development body, and a member of the steering committee of The Big Picture campaign to promote picturebooks. She has been a judge of a number of book prizes for children and adults including the Orange Prize, and chaired panels to select a children’s laureate, the ten best new illustrators and the top ten Carnegie/Greenaway medal winners. She collaborated with Raymond Briggs on an overview of his work, Blooming Books (Cape), and her book about the Victorian philanthropist Samuel Plimsoll and his campaign on behalf of sailors, The Plimsoll Sensation (Little, Brown), was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and won the 2006 Mountbatten Maritime Prize and the international division of the US Maritime Literature Awards.

Originally from Leeds, she was a scholar at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford and a Henry Fellow in the Graduate School of English at Yale, and she now lives with her husband and children in London.