Alison Lowry has worked professionally in book publishing for over 30 years and has been a reader all her life. She began her career with Oxford University Press in Cape Town before relocating to Johannesburg in the late 1970s where she worked with academic books for Macmillan Publishers. When Jonathan Ball set up Jonathan Ball Publishers, she joined him as an editor and, as the company grew, became editorial director and took on responsibility for the management and expansion of the South African list. In 1986, together with her late husband, Howard Dalton, she set up her own publishing company, Lowry Publishers. After selling the company in 1989, she moved to Penguin Books South Africa in the position of publisher. She left the company in 2012, after serving as the company’s Chief Executive Officer for ten of those years.