Cover Stories: Ann Leslie's memoirs; Anya Serota; Val McDermid

* Daily Mail journalist Ann Leslie (below) has decided the time has come to write her memoirs. Naturally, she has engaged agent supreme Ed Victor, who has concluded a deal with Georgina Morley of Macmillan, also home to John Sargeant, Andrew Marr and John Simpson. A remarkable life began in North-West India at the time of Partition and continued, after Oxford, with Leslie's own column on the Daily Express. Since then she has reported from 70 countries, sauntering through wars "clad in full make-up and false eyelashes". Once, interviewing Muhammad Ali, she socked him on the jaw to gain his attention.

* Even if Anya Serota's connections (daughter of Sir Nicholas of Tate fame) have not exactly harmed her career, she has never been one to use them, and her success as a publisher has been on her own terms. True, her Macmillan traineeship began on The Dictionary of Art, but she then earned her stripes at the company under the exacting gaze of Maria Rejt. Roland Philipps, another publisher of distinguished lineage (grandmother Rosamond Lehmann, stepfather John Julius Norwich), then hired her to preside over the rebirth of John Murray's fiction list. Now Jamie Byng, in his new job as MD of Canongate, has poached her to join the company as editorial director, the role he filled before David Graham's departure for Granta. It is an astute move, and Byng believes Serota's taste and "great publishing flair" will benefit a company that has enjoyed a glorious past few years.

*At the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Val McDermid's The Torment of Others was Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year - with a £3,000 purse and a hand-turned oak cask as prizes. For McDermid, the award was particularly poignant, as the Festival was a special project of hers. But the prize could not happen without Ottakar's, which has always promoted the long list, and whose customers pick the winner. Waterstone's has yet to make a decision as to whether to stay involved.