Tom Maschler was a publisher for over four decades. While still in his twenties he ran Jonathan Cape, where he published no fewer than thirteen Nobel Prize winners. He nurtured the careers of many of the Twentieth Century's most esteemed authors including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, Joseph Heller, Roald Dahl, Bruce Chatwin, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut. He also came up with the idea for the Booker Prize, now acknowledged as the most significant fiction prize in the world.

Tom has long had a love and fascination for children's books. One of his proudest achievements at Cape was to attract Roald Dahl to the publishing house. Tom was also responsible for pairing Dahl with his long-time collaborator, Quentin Blake, whose illustrations contributed so much to the author’s books.