Andrew Lownie

Andrew Lownie has run his own literary agency since 1988 and , according to publishersmarketplace, has been the top selling agent in the world over the last three years. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers' Club Prize which supports first-time biographers. He is a member of the Advisory Board for Biographers International Organisation and a judge of the Plutarch Prize for biography.

He had until recently a regular advice column in the writing magazine Words with Jam, writes an entry each year on submitting to agents for The Writers Handbook, ,contributed to The Arvon Book of Life Writing , has been the literary agent to the international writers' organisation EnglishPEN. and regularly gives talks around the world on aspects of publishing.

Educated at the universities of Cambridge (where he was President of the Union) and Edinburgh, he has been a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His books include several guides to Edinburgh's literary associations, biographies of the writer John Buchan and the spy Guy Burgess (which won the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year) and a forthcoming life of Louis and Edwina Mountbatten.

The former London representative of the Washington-based National Intelligence Study Centre , he was the British representative on the six-man planning committee for the International Spy Museum in Washington and has written widely on intelligence for the London Times, Spectator, Telegraph, Guardian, Australian Age and Wall Street Journal. He is a trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information.