Victoria Hobbs

I am omnivorous when it comes to reading and my list reflects this, encompassing a wide range of genres and styles. I am proud to represent an invigorating mix of novelists, from Kamila Shamsie and Maggie O’Farrell to Conn Iggulden and Sandra Newman. I also represent a broad range of non-fiction writing from journalists such as Tim Shipman, Jane Garvey and Fi Glover, to significant cultural and political figures such as Deborah Frances-White and Lady Hale.

My authors have been Sunday Times bestsellers and won or been nominated for prizes such as the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Book Award. I have represented some of my writers for over twenty-five years now. Working alongside a writer from their first publication, and assisting in nurturing a readership and growing and sustaining a career, is a particular privilege of the job.

I am open to submissions and always hoping to hear from new writers. In terms of who they might be, my interests are broad.

I will always be excited by a new literary voice, and love to find myself pinned to the page by something stylistically dazzling, or compelling in its deceptive simplicity. Equally I would love to see fiction of the sprawling, big-boned sort like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting or Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Also ambitious (and, frankly, terrifying) fiction like American War by Omar El Akkad. I would welcome some fresh strangeness in the vein of the delightful Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly, or something intricately wrought and beautifully characterised, a slow-release pleasure, like Jane Gardam’s peerless Old Filth trilogy. I am also an avid reader of crime series and thrillers but don’t represent much in that area, so I would be delighted to see a well characterised, beautifully constructed and genuinely thrilling thriller come my way.

My head will always be turned by narrative non-fiction that reads like the very best fiction. In that vein, I was thoroughly bowled over by Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl.  Similarly, anyone who is striving to make sense of the world around us – whether that be through the lens of food, politics, nature, the body – will be very welcome in my inbox. My list of food writers is burgeoning and varied – from Katy Beskow to Rosie Sykes to the Rangoon Sisters – and I am always on the lookout for fresh takes on cookery.

In both fiction and non-fiction, I am hoping to encounter something I haven’t read before, whether it be the setting, the plot, the voice, or the community it has emerged from. Something new needs to be there in some form for that distinctive prickle of excitement to occur. I approach every book with the same sense of willing the author on, and wanting this to be something special.

Along with active authors, I also represent literary estates, including those of Shirley Jackson and Mary McCarthy.