sections:
Andrew Lownie was born in 1961 and was educated in Britain and America. He read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he was President of the Union. He went on to gain an MSc at Edinburgh University and spend a year at the College of Law in London.
After a period as a bookseller and journalist, he began his publishing career as the graduate trainee at Hodder & Stoughton.
In 1985 became an agent at John Farquharson, now part of Curtis Brown, and the following year became the then youngest director in British publishing when he was appointed a director.
Since 1984 he has written and reviewed for a range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Spectator and Guardian, which has given him good journalistic contacts.
As an author himself, most notably of a biography of John Buchan and a literary companion to Edinburgh, he has an understanding of the issues and problems affecting writers. He is a member of the Association of Authors' Agents and Society of Authors and was until recently the literary agent to the international writers' organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers' Club Prize which supports first-time biographers.
the agency's readers
GENNA GIFFORD has for more than ten years been dividing her time between work in London, New York and Melbourne - in both the literary world and in the television industry. In that time, among other things, she has worked as a literary reader, evaluator and editor; a freelance producer and a television format developer. Genna has been employed by the ABC, the BBC, various television production companies and a performing arts training centre as well as taking on a vast number of freelance projects in the literary field. Genna currently provides services to literary agencies and writers based in the UK and Australia as well as places as diverse as Istanbul, New Orleans, Bombay, Montreal and Paris. Visit her website at: www.gennagifford.com.
DAVID HAVILAND is a freelance journalist and sub-editor, who specialises in drama and screenplay development. He studied Film and English at the University of East Anglia, before working in advertising with M&C Saatchi, and moving into television with management roles at Simply Money and Sirius Television, of which he was a co-founder.
After the sale of the company, David left Sirius in 2003 to become a freelance writer and journalist, since when he has written regularly for a broad range of publications including City Life magazine and the Morning Star. He has also worked extensively in script development for a range of film and television companies, theatres, and agents.
David lives in London, and enjoys plays by David Mamet, films by Mike Leigh, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels.
JOHN JARROLD ran three science fiction and fantasy imprints – Orbit, Legend and Earthlight – between 1988 and 2002. Authors he has published and edited include Iain M Banks, Greg Bear, David Brin, Ray Bradbury, Terry Brooks, Maggie Furey, David Gemmell, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Harry Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Robert Jordan, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Ian R MacLeod, Michael Moorcock and Tad Williams. He has also published thriller authors including Lorenzo Carcaterra, Stel Pavlou, John Sandford and Tim Willocks. Since becoming a freelance editor in 2002, he has worked in the SF and fantasy field, as well as with thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction and general non-fiction.
MICHELLE LOOKNANAN was raised in New York, and has a degree in English Literature from New York University. Previously she lived in Madrid, and is now based in London. She has several years´ sales and marketing experience in the publishing industry with the New York offices of Oxford University Press and Continuum, and is also a book reviewer. Most recently she has begun doing editorial work for literary agents based in both London and New York, and works on her own writing in her spare time. Michelle enjoys cooking and is an avid reader, particularly of multicultural fiction and autobiographies.
ANDY MARINO has a Ph.D. in Literature and taught in British, US and Swedish universities. He left academia 14 years ago and since then has worked as a literary agent, editor and copywriter, and also in TV production. He has made documentaries for all the major UK channels, Discovery US and The History Channel, such as A History of the Beach, The Moulin Rouge Revealed, Traders of the Lost Scrolls, and films for the “Everyman” strand at the BBC and “Travels With My Camera” for C4. He was at The South Bank Show for several years and was an assistant producer on Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English. Among his most recent projects are Sex and Religion (ITV) Monsoon Railway (BBC), and The Secret Family of Jesus (C4). Andy has written for the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times and is the author of two books of historical biography: Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War Two (Faber & Faber US) and American Pimpernel (Hutchinson, UK, and St Martin’s Press, US). He lives in north London.
GEOFF PRIDMORE is a Cornish based author and freelance writer. He has lived in Cornwall since graduating in Journalism from Falmouth College of Arts. As an undergraduate he was a winning finalist in BBC Radio 4’s Fresh Air Media and shortly after graduation Hodder and Stoughton Educational published his first book Teach Yourself Journalism.
For some years Geoff was a Theatre-in-Education writer and storyteller performing his own one-man show for primary schools entitled: Alfred the Great! in which he acted out the story of the king who not only saved his country but used Humanitarian principles to build the modern England we know today.
Geoff has also been an Internet copywriter for some of the world’s most prestigious hotel chains and a marketing officer for the Gaia Energy Centre – a visitor centre for the UK’s first ever windfarm. When asked about what makes a good proposal, Geoff says, “The lengthy American model is a good example of how to construct a proposal for publishers; it’s probably the most important part of writing a book. If the proposal is right, and especially the title, a good book will surely follow. And, of course, the author has to be pre-active in marketing their book. My only other recommendation to authors is to do a course in editing as inflation coupled with poor punctuation and spelling does nothing to enhance a manuscript.”
DAVID SMITH is a freelance editor, researcher and writer. From 1992-2000, he was the editor of Gay Times magazine. A specialist in gay law reform and HIV/AIDS issues, he wrote book chapters, research outlines for TV documentaries and occasional features for the Independent. He is also the author of a series of health promotion booklets on sexual health, mental health and drug and alcohol abuse. Educated at the University of London, he has a degree in French and German literature, and for three years, part-time at Birkbeck college, he studied genealogical research, writing a dissertation about 18th-century antiquarianism. He has conducted research for authors and has edited books on Oscar Wilde, William Blake and 19th-century religious art. He is currently editing a book about Simone de Beauvoir.
TARA WIGLEY is a freelance editor and reader for UK-based literary agents. For the past four years, Tara has worked at the Abner Stein literary agency and as the junior fiction editor at Simon & Schuster publishers, where she edited a range of literary and commercial titles. She received a first class degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and distinction in a Publishing Studies MA from City University, London. Tara’s desert island authors include Ali Smith, Milan Kundera, Maggie O’ Farrell, Glen Duncan and Carol Shields but she edits and reads across all fictional genres. She is now living in Sarajevo and can be contacted at tara@2106.org
subscribe to agency's newsletter
Andrew Lownie writes a monthly newsletter, which includes details of the Agency's latest news as well as advice for authors. If you would like to receive this free newsletter, please enter your email address in the box below.