NEW YORK, October 19 —Simon & Schuster announced today that Tim O’Connell will join the company’s adult trade publishing imprint as Vice President, Editorial Director, Fiction, starting on November 8, 2021. He will oversee the fiction program, supervising acquisitions, providing counsel to editors, and building his own list of authors, which will include both novelists and select nonfiction writers.

Prior to joining Simon & Schuster, Tim O’Connell worked in the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for over fifteen years. Publishing across genres and formats, he has sought to champion unique voices from a wide spectrum of authors.

In 2020, his author of twelve years, Charles Yu, won the National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Interior Chinatown. That same year Vanessa Veselka’s novel The Great Offshore Grounds was long-listed for the same award. This year Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise is a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Award, and Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction, as is Kristen Radtke’s Seek You for Nonfiction.

He has worked with numerous bestselling and award-winning authors including Ted Chiang, Nathan Hill, Lauren Hough, Karin Tidbeck, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Amitava Kumar, Sharon Stone, Shaun Hamill, B.J. Novak, Tiffany McDaniel, Oscar Cásares, Kimberly King Parsons, Nico Walker, Jim Carrey & Dana Vachon, Daryl Gregory, William Brewer, B. Catling, Debbie Urbanski, Ellyn Gaydos, Clémence Michallon, Jaimy Gordon, and Sergio de La Pava.

Originally from Hamden, Connecticut, Tim O’Connell is a dual citizen of Ireland and The United States. He has an MFA in Poetry from Texas State University, where he won an Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Award for a poem entitled “The Trellises.” He has been published in the Bat City Review and Prelude, and has been a Frankfurt Fellow, a Beijing Publishing Fellow, a Norwegian Literature Abroad Fellow, and Finish Literature Exchange Fellow. He has worked closely with the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and has been invited to speak at The Mae Fellowship in December of this year.

“Tim is a superb editor with a proven record of championing best-selling authors of some of the boldest and most interesting fiction of our time. He is also known for supporting first-time authors with unique, diverse voices that demand to be amplified. Tim has the experience, intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm that will make him a force as the head of our storied fiction program. I could not be more pleased to welcome him to Simon & Schuster,” says Dana Canedy, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster.

Tim O’Connell added, “I am thrilled to join Dana Canedy and the rest of the amazing team at Simon & Schuster. Dana has a remarkable vision for an iconic imprint, and I’m honored to join her in building a list of daring, diverse, and bold fiction that is at once commercially entertaining and culturally significant. I want Simon & Schuster to be recognized as a publisher where writers will want to build their careers because they have an original voice that demands to be heard and they understand Simon & Schuster is a place to grow and reach as many readers as possible.

“I have also been very fortunate to work alongside some of the best people in the business at Vintage, Knopf, and Pantheon. From the top down they enabled me to chase my passions, and I owe every ounce of the success I’ve been fortunate to have to them and the incredible book culture they’ve created and allowed me to be part of. And now I am excited for this next step as Editorial Director of Fiction at Simon & Schuster. I can’t wait to get started. It is going to be fun.”

 

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Simon & Schuster, a ViacomCBS Company, is a global leader in general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for readers of all ages, and in all printed, digital and audio formats. Its distinguished roster of authors includes many of the world’s most popular and widely recognized writers, and winners of the most prestigious literary honors and awards. It is home to numerous well-known imprints and divisions such as Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Atria Books, Gallery Books, Adams Media, Avid Reader Press, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing and Simon & Schuster Audio and international companies in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, and proudly brings the works of its authors to readers in more than 200 countries and territories. For more information visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.

Contact:
Julia Prosser, VP, Director of Publicity,
212-698-7529; Julia.Prosser@simonandschuster.com