Martyn Goff

Martyn Goff CBE (7 June 1923 – 25 March 2015) was a British literary administrator, author, and bookseller. He made a significant contribution to the organisation and popularity of the Booker Prize for many years, and was involved in efforts to increase literacy and book ownership, particularly among children.

Born in 1923, he grew up in Hampstead, London. His father, Jacob Gulkov, was a Russian fur dealer who had emigrated to Britain and became a supplier to department stores. After studying at Clifton College in Bristol, he won a place at Oxford University to study English but the intervention of World War Two meant he joined the RAF as a Lancaster bomber wireless operator serving in the Middle East. While there, he edited a magazine that included book and music reviews, and wrote a letter to the poet Siegfried Sassoon. The poet, while writing later to John Maynard Keynes, suggested that this letter was instrumental in the poet's going back to writing after a barren spell of two years. Goff was demobilised in 1946.

In 1948, Goff opened his first bookshop, in St Leonard's-on-Sea, East Sussex, after working unpaid for a period in a bookshop in Charing Cross, London, to gain experience as a bookseller. He later started two more bookshops on the English south coast, and relocated to Sussex in 1950, buying an existing bookshop business in Banstead. After he retired from the Trust in 1988, he returned to bookselling, and became the chairman a specialist seller of antiquarian works in Sackville Street, Piccadilly.

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