Working from the first reply, which was a good start, I'm not sure this would qualify as "elegant", but it does what you want:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;


my @things_to_sort = (
                   { author => 'bart', title => 'skateboarding' },
                   { author => 'lisa', title => 'postmodernism' },
                   { author => 'marge', title => 'hairstyles' },
                   { author => 'lisa', title => 'THIS BOOK FIRST' },
                   { author => 'homer', title => 'donuts' },
                   { author => 'bart', title => 'coolness' }
                  );

my ($first) = grep { $_->{title} eq 'THIS BOOK FIRST' } @things_to_sor
+t;
my @sorted = 
    sort { $a->{title} cmp $b->{title} } 
        grep { $_->{author} eq $first->{author} } @things_to_sort;

push @sorted, 
    sort { $a->{author} cmp $b->{author} or $a->{title} cmp $b->{title
+} }
        grep { $_->{author} ne $first->{author} } @things_to_sort;

print Dumper \@sorted;
[download]

I couldn't figure out a way to do it all in a single sort block -- especially when it comes to figuring out which author should be listed first. That just seemed to need an extra step at the outset. Maybe there's a way to use just one sort block after grepping for "THIS BOOK FIRST", but I haven't found it...

update: my first posting had a much more complicated block for the first sort -- which was a failed attempt to do everything in one sort -- but I simplified it to just the appropriate logic.