Parkeast Literary Agency director Gloria Koehler has retired, and her duties have been outsourced to another firm. Donna Eastman will stay on as editorial director at Parkeast, and will continue to market its books. Koehler is cfo of Splinterfire, a family-oriented literary referral service she started with Donna Eastman.
At Chronicle Books, Ariel Richardson has been promoted to editor, children’s. Lizzie Vaughn has joined as designer.
Zak Nelson has joined Seattle-area Third Place Books and takes over as manager of events and marketing at the beginning of May. Most recently, he was a book reviewer for Shelf Awareness and a bookseller at Amazon Books. As planned, Wendy Ceballos will leave the group in May and relocate to New York.
Intercontinental Literary Agency and Lucas Alexander Whitley will represent Pocket Jeunesse for translation rights in their young adult and middle grade novels.
Awards
The PEN America Literary Awards were presented on Monday evening. Hisham Matar won the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a $75,000 prize, for his memoir The Return (Random House); Poet Adonis won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; Rion Amilcar Scott won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, for his collection Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky); and Angela Morales won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for her collection The Girls in My Town (University of New Mexico Press).
In the UK, the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction named its shortlist:
Jo Baker, A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Sebastian Barry, Days Without End (Faber)
Charlotte Hobson, The Vanishing Futurist (Faber)
Hannah Kent The Good People (Picador Australia)
Francis Spufford Golden Hill (Faber)
Graham Swift Mothering Sunday (Scribner)
Rose Tremain The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus)