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Colwill & Peddle set to delve into the deep end as new agency heads to Frankfurt
Founded by Charlotte Colwill and Kay Peddle, whose backgrounds are in bookselling and editing respectively, a new south-east London agency is taking an adventurous list to the Messe.
The pandemic was responsible for a lot of things, many of them bad—not least this reporter’s extra stone of padding, which I still can’t shift no matter how many damn HIIT classes I go to. But there were some bonuses, too. One of which is that it led in part to the formation of one of the UK’s newest literary agencies, Colwill & Peddle.
Charlotte Colwill and Kay Peddle were on similar trajectories entering the pandemic. Both were book trade veterans—the majority of Colwill’s experience was in bookselling, including stints at Daunt Books and Foyles; Peddle had been a non-fiction editor at Vintage, primarily at The Bodley Head—who had recently taken the plunge to launch their own literary agencies. Both were also mothers of young children and lived near each other in south-east London.
Being new to the game during lockdowns had its obvious challenges and another agent, C&W managing director Sophie Lambert, suggested the two should connect. Colwill says: “She said, ‘There’s another agent out on her own right near you, you should meet.’ So Kay and I began talking, at first more just for support sessions and we got to know each other that way. Our tastes really complement each other—and our whole attitude to authors and writing seems to gel well. So we talked about getting together for a while and took the plunge this year. Sounds very romantic, doesn’t it?” Peddle adds: “We were quite happy running our own independent lists. What really convinced us [to join forces] is that we shared the vision of wanting to open up the industry as much as possible and to do things a little bit differently in terms of how we go about finding writers. We just wanted to bring that energy together.”
The agency officially launched this month and the duo are skipping the frying pan and going right into the fire with their first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The agency’s big titles on submission broadly showcase the two agents’ complementary tastes. Peddle is exclusively non-fiction and looks for “books that spark discussion, that have the potential to change opinions and reveal hidden aspects of a familiar story”. One of her biggest FBF offerings is Kimberley McIntosh’s collections of essays, black girl, no magic. McIntosh is the first author Peddle signed and has an interesting CV: social justice policymaker, writer of opinion pieces (for the Guardian and Washington Post) and a stint as the dating columnist at gal-dem. “She does a very clever thing of being able to fuse quite abstract political ideas with the personal, and make them accessible and funny,” Peddle says.
Colwill, meanwhile, does a bit of non-fiction, but her sweet spot is increasingly in adult and children’s fiction, with the edgy end of genre writing particularly fecund at the moment. Gianni Washington is a good example, with Colwill recently inking a two-book deal with Viper for the American literary horror writer. Colwill says: “She just comes at things from a completely fresh perspective. She’s steeped in the horror genre but she also loves Japanese manga, so a lot of her stories are imbued with these slightly dark and twisted genres.”
Diversity drive
A big push for the Association of Authors’ Agents this year is broadly about transparency and opening the profession up in order to have the widest possible base, and to attract not just new writers, but to bring more people from different backgrounds into the profession. It happened independently of the AAA push, but Colwill & Peddle is almost like a perfect best practice case of how one would do this from the get-go. That starts with an open submissions policy, but also that the agency’s website is half a showcase for clients and their work, half-mini-Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, with tips and tricks for new authors, information on the publishing process and interviews with industry professionals such as book designer Anna Green and marketer Indira Birnie.
The duo have done this partially because they think it will help the agency, both in building the profile and luring new, exciting authors. But they also unabashedly believe in a core ethos of trying to demystify the trade. Colwill says: “It may be that we both came to agenting from slightly unconventional routes—we didn’t start off as assistants in agencies that were decades old. We’re not the first to realise that agenting has been a bit of a sort of tower in the clouds; people feel like they don’t know [the process]—what a literary agent does. In terms of breaking into the industry or authors trying to be represented, that’s really bad, because it is exclusionary for a lot of people.”
Peddle adds: “None of what we are doing is revolutionary, as it has been covered a lot recently. But we need to grow the industry and to do that you need to diversify the people who work within it. They will be naturally interested and drawn to different books.”
Peddle adds that she feels passionately about this issue as her entrée to the trade wasn’t the easiest. She is South African and moved to the UK in 2006 to do an MA at Oxford Brookes. So far, so typically publishing. But breaking into the business was difficult: this was the era of unpaid work experience and internships, and she was only able to make it because she became friends with someone else on her course who had a flat in London, and she was able to crash on his couch. The ducking and diving eventually paid off when she got the Vintage job, and she received a huge boost early in her career when, as an editorial assistant, she won the 2011 Kim Scott Walwyn Prize for an audiobooks project she devised for The Bodley Head.
From childhood, Colwill was a “big fan of story”—films, musical theatre and particularly books. After studying English and Philosophy at Manchester, she did a Publishing MA, at LCC. While doing her MA thesis, Colwill interviewed a Daunt’s staffer called Max Porter, who told her that the bookseller had some vacancies coming up. She jumped at the chance and stayed for a decade (“I still love bookselling, I still miss it”). But being an agent had been a dream that she had deferred during her bookselling days, and she decided to have a crack, with a stint at Tibor Jones, then at Jo Unwin, where she covered Rachel Mann’s maternity leave before making the leap of “building my own list, with my own interests”.
Circling back to Colwill & Peddle’s formation, both believe that the business having its roots in the pandemic has its benefits. Colwill says: “We can’t afford the office in Kensington yet, but in the way things have changed, fancy offices are less of a priority. In the past, a lot of publishing has revolved in or near central London, at certain parties, at certain lunches. Which is fine—I’m certainly not anti-lunch, and it’s great to see people in person again. But these days you can start up in your bedrooms, like we did.”
That has influenced the thinking over agency expansion. “We we are going to prioritise hiring new talent over getting office space,” Peddle says. “We’ve been able to start with this hyper-flexible model, so we would love to get more like-minded people into the company to help it grow.”
