Esme Bright
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission route
- Response time
- Assume no reply = no after 16 weeks
- Last checked
- 14 days ago
About
Esme assists Andrew Gordon and Jessica Woollard and is starting to build her own list of literary fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry.
Genres
Looking for
- bold literary and upmarket fiction that makes her sit up and pay attention at a sentence level
- novels that balance emotional complexity with close attention to language and voice, whether a multi-generational family saga or the anatomy of a single day
- fiction that treats the intimate and domestic as of literary importance
- books that upturn the idea of the everyday, exposing what is absurd and hilarious about the banal or playing with the uncanny
- narrative non-fiction
- poetry
Agency submission guidelines
Assume no response = no after 8-16 weeks depending on the agent.
Links
Clients include
- Olivia Downes
- Jonathan Egid
- Erin Leland
- Nasim Luczaj
- M. Syd Rosen
Other agents at David Higham Associates
Andrew Gordon
Andrew joined David Higham Associates in 2007 and is a director of the company and head of the Books department. Before becoming an agent he worked on the publishing side for fifteen years, in publicity at Hodder & Stoughton and as an editor and publisher at Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster. His list is primarily non-fiction and includes leading historians, journalists and commentators. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Cundill History Prize.
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Christabel McKinley
Christabel came into publishing via teaching English in Korea, where she taught literature to children between six and eleven years of age. She believes children's books should be accessible, inclusive and unpatronising, as well as impactful and a pleasure to read. She represents authors and illustrators across the spectrum of writing and illustrating for children and young adults, spanning fiction to non-fiction and picture books to graphic novels.
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Elise Dillsworth
Elise became a literary agent in 2012, having previously been a commissioning editor at Virago Press. She co-founded the Diversity in Publishing Network in 2004, which received the New Venture Award from Women in Publishing in 2005. Her authors have won or been nominated for awards including the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Forward Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Isobel Boston
Isobel joined David Higham in 2025 after more than ten years working as an editor in illustrated children's publishing. She began her career at Templar Publishing and Big Picture Press, commissioning across a boutique list of illustrated books, and was later Commissioning Editor at Walker Books. She is building a list of children's book creators and works across all formats.
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Jemima Forrester
Before joining David Higham in 2016 Jemima was Senior Commissioning Editor at Orion Publishing Group, and she has brought that collaborative, editorial way of working into her role as an agent.
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Jessica Woollard
Jessica has been a literary agent for thirty years, beginning her career at Toby Eady Associates, where she worked first for Alexandra Pringle and went on to become a Director before leaving ten years later for The Marsh Agency. She joined David Higham in January 2016 on returning from Mumbai, where she had been working as an agent remotely for five years. She was the agent for H is for Hawk, and represents academics, activists, artists, scientists and journalists. Authors she works with have won or been shortlisted for major prizes including the Booker, the Baillie Gifford, the Costa, the Guardian First Book Award, the National Book Award, Waterstones Book of the Year, the Wainwright and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.
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Lizzy Kremer
Lizzy joined David Higham in 2004, after working for an agent and, before that, as a publicist. She is Managing Director of the agency, a former President of the Association of Authors' Agents and a British Book Industry Awards Agent of the Year, and she advocates for clients on the industry issues that shape writing and publishing. Her strong engagement with the economics of publishing means she has a particular interest in taking on authors mid-career, whether bestsellers or not. She lives between London and New York.
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Maddalena Cavaciuti
Maddalena studied English Literature at the University of Bristol and joined David Higham Associates in 2017 after a spell working in marketing and events. In 2019 she helped to run the first of many David Higham Open Days for Under-Represented Writers. She is the agency's Head of Audio and works with Managing Director Lizzy Kremer on selected projects.
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Martha Perotto-Wills
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Molly Ker Hawn
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Nicola Chang
Nicola joined David Higham Associates in 2020 and represents prize-winning writers of literary and general fiction, non-fiction and poets. Her authors include Sara Ahmed, Raymond Antrobus, J. M. Coetzee, Jacqueline Crooks, Emma Glass, Gabriel Krauze, Saba Sams and Kae Tempest. Nicola is a recipient of the London Book Fair’s Trailblazer Award and a Bookseller Rising Star. Nicola responds first and foremost to original voices that challenge the idea of what a literary novel, and sentence, can do, as well as propulsive character-driven novels with intricate plots, unforgettable set pieces and dazzling dialogue. Nicola is drawn to experiments in form that defy easy definition, vernacular-inflected realism, the tragicomic, the weird and ethereal, seeking emotional complexity and transformative storytelling. In non-fiction Nicola is interested in narrative-driven, persuasive perspectives, a unique fearless voice and the interplay between the personal and the political, particularly from early-career scholars, critics and writers thinking deeply and universally about society through subjects such as the arts, food, family, language, creativity, sport, the body, work, travel and music, and if these works can be delivered provocatively and humorously, all the better.
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Orli Vogt-Vincent
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Sara Langham
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