Colin Dickerman will join Grand Central as vp, editorial director/nonfiction, on January 19, 2021. He was most recently executive editor at Farrar, Straus.
Emma Bal will join the Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV & Film Agency as a nonfiction agent on February 1. She was previously head of publicity for nonfiction at Bloomsbury UK.
At UNC Press, publicity director Gina Mahalek is retiring after 20 years. Peter L. Perez will join in January in the newly created position of director of public relations and communications. He was most recently public relations and communications director at University of California Press. Sonya Bonczek will join in December as director of publicity. She was most recently publicity manager at Harvard University Press.
Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency is expanding, with a new office in Stockholm to serve its domestic and international clients in the Scandinavian territories.
Gyldendal Norsk has appointed Maria B. Campbell Associates as its US scout for adult and children’s books.
Carlo D’Este, 84, historian and biographer who won the Andrew Goodpaster Prize and the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, died on November 21.
Bookselling
Powell’s Books has “decided to permanently close” their Powell’s Home & Garden store. Emily Powell writes; “Unfortunately it was … an increasingly challenging part of our business as retail continues its evolution. With the onslaught of this year, we simply could not find a way to bring it through 2020 and 2021 and into an unknown future.”
Partnerships
Macmillan will distribute education technology company Encantos, and jointly develop new titles based on the existing and new Encantos properties.
Awards
The Whiting Foundation announced its eight nonfiction grant recipients:
Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves (FSG)
Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty (Avid ReaderMore)
Carina del Valle Schorske, The Other Island (Riverhead)
Ben Goldfarb, The Ecology of Roads (Norton)
Ferris Jabr, A Symphony of Earth (Random House)
Blair LM Kelley, Black Folk (Liveright)
Brandon Shimoda, Japanese American Historical Plaza (City Lights Publishers)
Salamishah Tillet, All the Rage (Ecco)
Best Of
More best books of 2020 lists include Vanity Fair‘s top 15 and Entertainment Weekly‘s 10 best titles of the year:
1. The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
2. Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi
3. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar
4. Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam
5. Memorial, by Bryan Washington
6. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
7. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
8. Daddy, by Emma Cline
9. Red Comet, by Heather Clark
10. A Burning, by Megha Majumdar