Emma Parry

People category
Agents

Emma Parry
Role
Literary Agent

I’m looking for transporting, propulsive storytellers and arresting ideas. I love writers who extend empathy, resist all manner of tyrannies, and entertain. I want pages which whip by and spark good conversation.
 
I want to see novels with irresistible plots, distinctive voices, fresh perspectives, big characters, historical insights, smart romance, heart, and wit. 
 
I love all non-fiction with the power to surprise and gratify. I welcome memoir, reportage, history, science, and narrative.
 
I have helped launch the career of many prize winning and bestselling authors, including Rutger Bregman, Tara Isabella Burton, Bernadine Evaristo, Rebecca Godfrey, Tricia Hersey, Claire Keegan, Hari Kunzru, Sacha Baron Cohen, Brian Muraresku, and Andrew Smith.
 
I’ve also represented the work of great established talents including Germaine Greer; Alan Hollinghurst, David Kennedy, Marian Keyes, Paul McCartney, Maggie O’Farrell, the late VS Naipaul, Kamila Shamsie and JM Straczynski.
 
After Cambridge, I joined the graduate program of Ogilvy & Mather before being rescued from advertising by the British literary agent Gillon Aitken. When I was 25, Gillon sent me to New York to oversee the publication of BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY and Germaine Greer’s THE WHOLE WOMAN while training at FSG. I fell in love with the city and its publishing scene; met my husband and stayed.
 
In 2003, I founded a new agency with Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Parry. Out of a little Carriage House off Union Square we built a thriving list and business to the point an uncommon opportunity presented itself to sell.
 
After a gardening leave, which I enjoyed with my two small children in the house my husband and I had built in the Hudson Valley, I joined Janklow & Nesbit in 2013, where I have been building a list of vital literary figures and pioneering thinkers since.
 
I am proud of our commitment to independence and our clout as an agency and of the strength and collegiality of our team. I’m grateful to be free to team with any screen agent, and to prioritize my authors’ interests first and last. We have a superb London office and foreign rights department and impressive accounting, business affairs and contracts teams to help defend clients’ interests, whatever the challenge.
 
I’ve worked with winners of the Shiva Naipaul Prize for Travel Writing, the National Book Critics Circle, the Man Booker, the Pulitzer and the Nobel - and I'm always looking for writers who might add to that list (and with whom I can have fun trying).
 
I love to help writers make money, achieve the best possible iteration of their work, get the optimum publishing experience, and reach and captivate the maximum audience. I love to find ways to move the needle for clients in new deal configurations and markets. I love it when authors hit the Bestseller Lists. I want that for them all, and never stop looking for ways to get them there.

Selected authors

  • Alex Bellos
  • Rutger Bregman
  • Tara Isabella Burton
  • Rangan Chatterjee
  • The Estate of Isabel Colegate
  • Jean-Philippe Cyr aka The Buddhist Chef
  • Glory Edim
  • The Estate of Harlan Ellison
  • Mary Fulbrook
  • Hannah Fry
  • Stephen Grey
  • Bethann Hardison
  • Tricia Hersey/The Nap Ministry
  • Meg Howrey
  • Gaelynn Lea
  • Brian C. Muraresku
  • Jodie Patterson
  • Kareem Rosser
  • Tom Shone
  • Samantha Silva
  • Andrew Smith
  • Congresswoman Jackie Speier
  • Nell Stevens
  • J. Michael Straczysnski
  • Nina Tandon
  • Julius Taranto
  • Upworthy
  • Tyler Wetherall
  • Kim Wickens