Suresh Ariaratnam
Board Member
Biography
Suresh Ariaratnam has represented prize-winning clients as a literary and talent agent, including recipients of the TS Eliot Prize, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Ted Hughes Award. He currently advises and acts on behalf of the multi-disciplinary artists, Jay Bernard and Johny Pitts.
Having focused on championing equality of opportunity and of outcome for authors from minoritised ethnicities, he remains involved in helping to ensure the equitable treatment of people from marginalised communities, in the creative economy and more generally.
As a non-executive director for NHS Somerset, where he chairs the Primary Care Commissioning Committee, and at NHS Dorset HealthCare, he is especially interested in the socio-economic determinants of health; as well as a holistic understanding of wellbeing which champions the interdependency between personal, societal, and planetary health.
Suresh serves as co-chair of Literature Works, the writer development agency for south-west England, as a trustee of Trussell, where he chairs the Strategy, Impact, and People Committee, and as a member of the British Library Advisory Council. In 2022, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant of Somerset in 2024.
