Biography
Dr Gabriel Heaton has been a specialist at Sotheby’s since 2005, and has a particular interest in English literary and historical manuscripts. He has been responsible for many auction highlights including Freddie Mercury’s lyrics, major literary manuscripts by Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath’s letters to Ted Hughes, historical documents by Queen Elizabeth I and Mahatma Gandhi, the rules of the world’s oldest football club, and more unusual items such as an Elizabethan book of spells, Friedrich von Hayek’s Nobel Medal, and the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was used in the novel’s obscenity trial. He was the specialist in charge of such auctions as the Coronation Sale (2023), Sex Pistols sale (2022), John Lennon sale (2014), and the series of sales History in Manuscript (2020-2022) and The Beatles (2019-2021). He has overseen the private sale of numerous archives and individual manuscript treasures, and was the key specialist responsible for the sale of the Honresfield Library to the Friends of the National Libraries for £15m in 2021.
Dr Heaton obtained his doctorate from the University of Cambridge and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warwick prior to joining Sotheby’s. His book, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: from George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
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