Founder and longtime managing director of Janklow & Nesbit UK Tif Loehnis will join Canongate as senior editor on September 5. In her decade at the agency, Loehnis represented authors including Tilly Bagshawe, Charles Cumming, Jasper Fforde, Julie Kavanagh, and Henry Porter, before leaving in 2010 and taking a short break from the industry. Canongate publishing director Nick Davies said in a statement: “Tif is a perfect fit for Canongate. She has great taste in books, a genuine and straightforward connection with her writers, and a restless curiosity about the future of the industry. I have no doubt Tif will build an eclectic and highly successful list for us, but also challenge and enrich the way we publish books at Canongate.”
Margaret O’Connor has parted amicably with Renaissance Literary & Talent and started her own agency, Innisfree Literary. She will continue to represent her current list of authors and is looking for commercial and up-market fiction, including historical, paranormal, quality women’s fiction and YA, memoir, narrative non-fiction, sports, pop-culture, humor, cookbooks and food/wine narratives.
In other agency moves, Kathleen Rushall, previously an agent at Waterside Productions, has joined the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency and is looking for fresh voices in all areas of young adult and middle grade literature including fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction, dystopian stories, and contemporary fiction. She also represents select picture books and adult non-fiction from how-to to lifestyle and parenting.
At Random House, Skip Dye has been promoted to vp, library, academic, and Random House Publisher Services adult sales. The Random House adult library and academic marketing team will join together with the Books on Tape sales under his leadership.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, the author of celebrated travel books including A TIME OF GIFTS, which recounted his walk from Constantinople to Bulgaria at the age of 18, and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, died today at the age of 96.
Telegraph obit
For other readings about people of interest, Forbes India has a long piece on David Davidar‘s publishing “comeback strategy” in India. They say he was “was wooed by at least eight publishing houses” before establishing a new publishing house with Rupa & Company, Aleph Book Company.
Controversial Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson finally had his heart surgery last week, according to the Central Asia Institute. In addition to repairing a hole in his heart, they report that doctor found and treated an aneurysm as well.
Author Sebastian Junger tells the LA Times he is “not going to do any more frontline reporting” from war zones. “I don’t want to put my wife through what I went through with Tim [Hetherington],” his friend, film collaborator and photojournalist who was killed in Libya in April.