Our people
For contact details, click on a team member's picture.
Christine Yeates
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Cecilia Kupera
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Diane Davis
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Sarah Magee
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Donna Hibbert
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Nicola Richardson
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- Admin Assistant
CIEP Council: current directors of the Institute
The CIEP Council comprises up to 12 directors who, following their election, hold their posts for up to two years.
Louise Harnby
Louise started her publishing life in-house, first with Williams & Wilkins in 1991 and then with SAGE Publishing from 1993–2005. In both roles she was responsible for the international marketing of academic books and journals. She went freelance in 2006, joined the Institute in that year and became an Advanced Professional Member in 2008.
Louise is a fiction line editor who works exclusively and directly with crime fiction, mystery, thriller and suspense novelists. She also creates online training courses and books that teach the art of sentence-level fiction editing and the business of editorial freelancing (including social media, marketing and branding). In 2021, Louise authored the CIEP guide Editing Fiction Containing Gender-Neutral Pronouns.
One of Louise’s editorial passions is making complex ideas accessible and visible, and she’s brought that to her CIEP work by steering initiatives that increase the Council’s transparency – including rejuvenating Council News and championing Council papers – and by leading on the review and development of the CIEP’s legal framework and strategic plan.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Denise Cowle
Denise has been copyediting and proofreading since 2011, following a career as a physiotherapist in the NHS for 25 years. She joined the SfEP in 2012 and became an Advanced Professional Member in 2015.
Denise has been an active member of the CIEP since attending her first local group meeting. She was the local group coordinator for the Glasgow group from 2014–17 and gave a session at her first conference in 2015.
Joining the Content Marketing Academy in 2015 revolutionised Denise’s approach to marketing her business, and she is a committed advocate of the principles of content marketing, applying them to both her own business and the CIEP. Denise won the Best Business Blog award from the CMA in 2017.
Denise now teaches proofreading and marketing for organisations such as Publishing Scotland, BookMachine and the CIEP and has her own expanding suite of online courses.
First as marketing director, then as vice-chair, Denise has continued to champion a growth-focused strategy for the CIEP that raises awareness, fosters engagement, and generates sales and income.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Abi Saffrey
Abi started editing and managing editorial projects in 2000, when she joined a small business-to-business publisher within the Bonnier group. She worked at Continuum, Dun & Bradstreet, and Learning and Teaching Scotland before going freelance in 2009. Abi proofreads and copyedits economics, social policy and political publications, and project manages education textbooks and resources.
Abi joined the SfEP in 2005, becoming an Advanced Professional Member in 2012. She co-created the CIEP’s Editorial Project Management course (for which she is a tutor), and wrote its Editorial Project Management guide. Abi volunteered to coordinate the SfEP blog in the summer of 2018, with that evolving into a position on the information team in January 2020. While on the information team, Abi produced the CIEP’s bimonthly external newsletter, Editorial Excellence, and continued to coordinate the blog, as well as writing several fact sheets and project managing the production of a guide. Abi was elected to the CIEP Council in September 2021.
- Email:
- [email protected]
John Ingamells
John came to freelance editing later in life having first pursued a career in the Diplomatic Service followed by 10 years in the City. He served as press attaché at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires from 1990 to 1994, giving him an early appreciation of the importance of careful and accurate use of language.
He joined the then SfEP in 2015 and was elected to the CIEP Council in 2021, taking over the community remit. Since becoming a director, John has worked with the local groups in navigating the challenges of returning to in-person meetings after the pandemic. He has overseen the completion and publication of a new guide for local group coordinators and helped get three new special interest groups up and running.
John had been a forum moderator for a few years before joining the Council, giving him valuable background for his directorial role in overseeing the team of moderators. He has helped bring four new moderators onto the team.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Beth Hamer
Following a 20-year career at the BBC in various business management roles, Beth joined the SfEP in 2013 while retraining as a proofreader. She became an Advanced Professional Member in 2017. She works mainly for publishers, both trade and academic, in the social sciences and humanities, and for independent authors, mostly in crime fiction.
Beth joined the Council in 2016 as the conference director, a position she’s held ever since, and is responsible for all aspects of organising the annual event, from finding the venue and putting together the programme to ensuring that everyone’s dietary requirements are met and hosting the quiz night (secretly her favourite part).
In 2020, when it became clear that holding an in-person conference wasn’t going to be possible, Beth successfully managed the transition online, which had the very positive side effect of broadening attendance to those who – for various reasons – aren’t usually able to make it. To maintain this level of accessibility, she took up the challenge to create a hybrid conference in 2022, so that delegates could attend both in person and online.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Richard Hutchinson
Richard spent 25 years working as a software engineer in the defence, telecommunications and law enforcement domains before joining the then SfEP in 2011 while retraining as a proofreader and copyeditor. He became an Advanced Professional Member in 2013, and enjoys using his maths degree and computing background in editing academic books and journal papers.
Since joining the Council as digital services director in 2018, Richard has overseen the day-to-day running and updating of the digital systems supporting CIEP operations and the membership; undertaken a complete rebranding exercise in the transfer from SfEP to CIEP; rationalised the file sharing and calendaring for CIEP operations; introduced a flexitime system to support the office staff; implemented and supported online participation in EGMs and AGMs; introduced a conference app to support and connect delegates; and researched, specified, procured, and is in the process of implementing, a new digital platform to integrate the CIEP's disparate back-office and member- and public-facing systems.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Cathy Tingle
Cathy has been editing in some form for much of her working life, though she came relatively late to work after years of being a perpetual student. She has degrees in English, Victorian literature, and the prefiguration of Freud’s works in Victorian literature.
After a decade working in the City of London in marketing and corporate communications for a vocational awarding body, Cathy moved to Edinburgh where she edited Edinburgh for Under Fives, a 400-page guidebook for Edinburgh’s parents and carers.
In 2014 Cathy discovered the SfEP, immediately joined, and set about undertaking formal training in proofreading and editing with Margaret Aherne before launching herself as DocEditor. She mostly edits non-fiction, and mostly in the arts and humanities. She became an Advanced Professional Member in 2018 and since 2019 has tutored Publishing Scotland’s copyediting courses. In 2020 Cathy developed an editing course for communications professionals, also with Publishing Scotland.
Cathy joined the CIEP’s information team in 2019 and Council in 2022.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Hester Higton
Hester started her working life as an academic historian and museum curator. In 2005 she moved into freelance editorial work, joining the Institute in the same year. She became an Advanced Professional Member in 2009 and an LCGI in Editorial Skills in 2013.
Hester’s primary editorial focus is academic texts in the arts and humanities, particularly history, theology and classics. She works for publishers and individual authors.
Hester was elected to the CIEP Council in September 2022. However, she’s been immersed in the Institute’s training programme for years. She was among the first batch of tutors recruited to work on new online courses in 2013 and has continued as a tutor since then.
She has also developed live webinar courses and enhanced the accessibility of the CIEP’s in-person training provision for editors all over the world. Efficient Editing launched in 2020 and Copyediting 1: Introduction in 2022.
She has brought all this experience to bear in discussions of the development of the new online training platform.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Honorary positions
David Crystal OBE
David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of language and lectures to audiences throughout the world.
He is a prolific author with more than 100 books to his credit, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. In 2009 he published a linguistic autobiography, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through. His most recent books include Words in Time and Place (2014), The Disappearing Dictionary (2015), and Making a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015). He has also been a consultant on, contributor to or presenter of numerous radio and television programmes and series.
Honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and former president of the Society of Indexers, David Crystal was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in September 2004 and then honorary president in January 2016.
Susie Dent
Susie Dent is a writer and broadcaster on language. She has made over 2,000 appearances as the resident word expert on C4's Countdown, and comments regularly on TV and radio on words in the news. She has contributed to discussions on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, 15 x 15, Word of Mouth, More or Less, Today, and on Radio 5 Live's Breakfast and Drive programmes, and has been a regular panellist on R4's Wordaholics. She also frequently hosts shows on Radio Oxford.She has made guest appearances on many TV programmes including BBC Breakfast, Newsnight, This Morning and The One Show.
Susie answers notes and queries about words and phrases each week for the Radio Times, and writes a weekly column for mentalfloss.com. She has written for the Independent on Sunday, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and is the author of several books, including TThe Language Report, Susie Dent's Word of the Year, What Made the Crocodile Cry?, Weird Words (for children) and How to Talk Like a Local. She is currently researching another book for John Murray. She contributed to the BBC's nationwide survey on local dialects, Voices, and has been a judge on the Costa Book Awards and on the Academy Excellence Awards. She is a past President of the Samuel Johnson Society.
Susie was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in January 2016.
External support
