Laura Ferguson will join Open Road Media later this month as vp, special markets. Previously, she was director of premium, corporate and customer driven publishing at Simon & Schuster.
Emily Keyes has joined Foreword Literary as an agent. Previously she was an agent at the L. Perkins Agency.
French spy novelist Gerard de Villiers, 83, died Thursday in Paris of pancreatic cancer. De Villiers was the author of 200 novels featuring CIA contractor Malko Linge, the first appearing in 1964 and the last published in France last month. Five of his novels will be published by Vintage beginning in 2014, which marks the first major launch of his fiction in English in the US and Canada.
Pierre Lemaitre has won France’s most top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for his World War I epic Au Revoir Là-Haut. Quercus/MacLehose Press recently introduced Lemaitre to English-speaking audiences with ALEX, part of a projected trilogy (excerpted in our free Publishers Lunch Buzz Books Fall/Winter free ebook).
In other awards news, Goodreads is conducting the “opening round” of public voting for their Best Books of 2013.