Margaret Halton

About

Margaret is an agent and Head of Rights at PEW Literary.

She studied English at Oxford and has worked for publishing houses and literary agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, including ICM and Rogers, Coleridge & White. She has sold international rights in non-fiction and fiction titles by authors including Margaret Thatcher, Naomi Klein, Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby. She later worked as an editor at Granta Books, where she acquired titles by Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Herta Muller and Colson Whitehead, and now develops her own list of authors, focusing mainly on fiction.

Genres

Looking for

• novels that pack an emotional punch with characters you feel you get to know personally

Agency submission guidelines

The agency accepts submissions by both post and email. If submitting by email, send to submissions@pewliterary.com. Submission should be in Word or PDF format and 1.5 or double-spaced. Accompany with a cover letter that tells the agency a little about you as a writer. If submitting by post, send to: Submissions, PEW Literary, 46 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LP. Please do not send a stamped addressed envelope; once read, work will be recycled. Include an email address so the agency can respond directly. Fiction: submit in the first instance the opening three chapters (or fifty pages) along with a synopsis. The synopsis should be a clear explanation of the plot from first to final chapter. Accompany with a brief cover letter that tells the agency a little about you as a writer. Non-fiction: the agency will consider fully written non-fiction books, but the majority of non-fiction titles are sold on proposal. A non-fiction proposal should be approximately thirty pages long and should address: what the book is about and why it needs to be published; who you are and why you are the ideal person to write this book; a summary of the market for the book, including similar or competing books already published; a chapter of sample text (usually taken from an early part of the book, but not the introduction); an outline of chapters (a page per chapter, written in full prose). The agency does not represent children's picture books, poetry, or books entirely aimed at an academic market, and does not accept submissions of scripts for film, TV or theatre.

Links

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