Jenny Hewson

I joined Lutyens and Rubinstein in 2019, moving across from Rogers, Coleridge & White where I started out as an agent in 2010. I represent a wide range of award winning and bestselling authors from around the world, and authors I work with have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Costa Novel Award, the Wainwright Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the British Book of the Year Award, the Giller Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

For me, everything begins with that sense of voice and the quality of the writing on the page. I like to work very closely and collaboratively with authors, from careful editing of the manuscript right through to final publication and beyond. I’m an eclectic reader but I’m always looking for that strong connection to the writing itself and excitement to read on, regardless of genre. I’m open to submissions and keen to find distinctive voices and great storytelling of all kinds but with a particular focus on literary fiction, book club and historical fiction, memoir and narrative nonfiction. I love books which sit on that sweet spot between literary and commercial. I’m drawn to short, powerful novels that can be read in one or two sittings, in the vein of Natasha Brown’s Assembly or Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater or Mary Gaitskill’s This is Pleasure, but I also love wide ranging, ambitious intergenerational stories like the Cazalet Chronicles, or Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth. I’d love to find a big, transporting intergenerational story based either in the UK or beyond. I’ve also always loved the gothic, everything from Bram Stoker to Wilkie Collins. To have something along the lines of THE MOONSTONE landing in my inbox would always be welcome.

For nonfiction, I’m keen to hear from experts looking to write for a general readership, particularly in the fields of popular science, health, and social history.

Favourite novels of mine published in recent years (not represented by L&R) would include Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Lauren Groff’s The Matrix, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, Susan Stokes-Chapman’s Pandora, Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love, and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. And on the nonfiction side, titles would include Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Marc Hamer’s From Seed to Dust, Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of Beasts and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. Authors whose work remains a touchstone and I find myself returning to again and again include Hilary Mantel, James Salter, Colm Toibin, Annie Dillard, Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson and Tim Winton.