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Moir turns agent

30.06.08

Canongate's former editorial director turned agent Judy Moir is interviewed in the Times.

Moir was most recently head of Penguin's Scottish office until it was closed by the London-based publisher. “It still isn’t entirely clear to me why we were shut down,” she says of Pengion’s withdrawal. “We’d had four very productive years . . .Being closed down was the last thing I anticipated."

Moir says that acting as an agent gives her the opportunity to get in on the ground level of a book, helping to shape it from the outset rather than picking and packaging completed titles. As yet, however, there are no clients for her new agency and little likelihood that the authors who she helped nurture — among them Welsh, Faber, Martel and James Meek — will follow her.  Her plan is to open her in-tray to all-comers, secure in the knowledge that, as the man who famously chose not to sign the Beatles discovered, the next big thing often comes in the most unpromising of guises.

The Times

Penguin Canongate Agents Scotland Judy Moir

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