Hilary van Beek

Hilary van Beek is the publisher of the small independent press Head Wind, which she set up as a vehicle to publish the

books that the mainstream publishers are too afraid to take on.

Quite often it turned out that there were several very good reasons why these books were not being taken on, but she managed to stumble on paydirt in the shape of Dinsdale Mazloumian's Perpetual Pye, an extraordinary work that claimed that Pythagoras Vavasor had solved the perpetual motion problem and had been killed on the orders of the global military industrial complex. The success of this led to her taking on books by a number of other Vavasorologists, including Margot Evercreech and, ultimately, George Burgess.

Van Beek runs Head Wind as a solo operation, assisted only by a succession of poorly-paid, put-upon interns, the latest of which is Benjamin Unsworth.