Transatlantic Agency is launching an international rights adult literary division, headed by senior agent Carolyn Forde, who has been made partner. Also on the team are Evan Brown, Devon Halliday, and Laura Cameron.
Pearson announced that Mike Howells will become its new Chief Strategy Officer, based in London and working with the executive team and board “to shape and execute the plan for the business.”
Awards
Sarah Frier‘s No Filter: The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture, (Simon & Schuster) won the £30,000 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Best of
New York Times staff critics Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal, and Jennifer Szalai chose their best books of the year. Garner’s picks included Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies which made the NYT’s overall top ten list announced last week. Szalai’s list included Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, which were both also on the overall list.
Separately, the New York Times also chose its 25 favorite children’s books of the year.
The Waterstones Book of the Year is Orange Prize-winning Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.
Forthcoming
Lauren Groff‘s new novel MATRIX will be published by Riverhead Books on September 9, 2021. The book follows “seventeen-year-old Marie de France [who] is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.”
Paula Hawkins‘ third thriller A SLOW FIRE BURNING will be published on August 31, 2021, also by Riverhead in the US (and again from Doubleday UK/Transworld at the same time).