[pdurrant]

There is no perfect solution automated to this, as some authors just have weird names. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for example, whose family name is "Conan Doyle".

In calibre there is an "author sort" field, that has the name in a form suitable for sorting, in my example, it would be "Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur"

I think in EPUB metadata it appears as a file-as attribute, e.g.

<dc:creator opf:file-as="Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur" opf:role="aut">Sir Arthur Conan Doyle</dc:creator>