AGM Statement

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
26 June 2003


26 June 2003

             Bloomsbury Publishing Plc's AGM Statement

At today's AGM of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Nigel Newton, Chairman will make the
following statement:

'The current year has begun well and is in line with the Company's recent
trading statement. Acquisitions, new book launches and the continued development
of our backlist are showing good progress.

In terms of acquisitions, we started off the year with the purchase of Andrew
Brodie Publications, an educational publisher of photocopiable books for the UK
schools market. In March, we acquired Berlin Verlag ('Berlin'), one of Germany's
leading literary publishers. This is our first move into the foreign language
publishing market with the German market considered to be the second largest
book market after the USA. The profile of Berlin has striking similarities to
Bloomsbury, with its success built on identifying first time authors and
developing them into bestsellers. A number of Berlin's key authors such as
Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer and David Guterson are also published by
Bloomsbury in the English language. Since the acquisition, we have started a
German language children's list, with the first books to be published in the
autumn of this year. The team at Berlin will be working closely with our
children's operation both in the UK and the US to develop a quality list in the
German language market. The books will be published under the Bloomsbury
children's books imprint, a brand which enjoys worldwide recognition. Berlin is
not expected to make a contribution in 2003. However, with investment in its
future publishing programme and infrastructure, and full integration into the
group to be complete by the end of this year, we expect it to make good
contributions in the future.


                                     - 2 -

Turning to new launches, 2003 got off to a strong start with the publication of
Sophie Dahl's, The Man with the Dancing Eye which went straight into the Sunday
Times bestseller list. In April, we published The Summit of Everest to celebrate
the fiftieth anniversary of the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. It is
the first and only book to benefit from complete access to the Royal
Geographical Society's collection of photographs and documents. We have just
published Margaret Atwood's new novel, Oryx and Crake, which is already on the
bestseller list. On June 21st we published the fifth in the series of Harry
Potter books, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Sales of the new book
have been considerable and, according to Nielsen BookScan, the independent book
trade monitoring service, first day sales in the UK were 1,777,541 copies. The
build up to the publication has already stimulated increased demand in the other
four books in the series.

Increasing backlist revenues continues to be one of our core strategies for
growth. Ben Schott's, Schott's Original Miscellany, which was one of our major
revenue generators in 2002, was number one on the bestseller list for five
straight months in 2003. The book will be published, by Bloomsbury USA, in the
autumn, and a new book, Schott's Food and Drink, will be published in the UK in
the autumn. Paperbacks of our 2002 hardback bestsellers will be published in the
next few months. Donna Tartt's, The Little Friend, is due out in October 2003
and Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, which is due to be published in September, was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.

The publishing programme across the group going forward is strong. We will
continue to generate cash for future organic and acquisition growth and on the
basis of the group's performance to date we are confident that 2003 will be
another good year.'

                                      ENDS


Enquiries:

Financial Dynamics
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