Buckley joins Hannah Sheppard Literary Agency after three-year break

Louise Buckley will join the Hannah Sheppard Literary Agency (HS-LA) this month as associate agent, returning to publishing after a three-year break.

Working alongside its founder, Hannah Sheppard, Buckley joins the agency on 15th January and will build a new list of authors with a focus on upmarket and book-club fiction, as well as further developing the agency’s links with co-agents. Both Buckley and Sheppard will be at London Book Fair in March, a year after the agency was launched.

Buckley was most recently an associate Literary Agent at Zeno Agency Ltd where she represented a roster of commercial and literary fiction, including Anne Griffin’s When All is Said (Sceptre), which spent five weeks at number one in Ireland and sold into 17 territories.

Prior to that she worked at Pan Macmillan, where she commissioned and published across the commercial fiction division, including the bestselling Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll and saga author Mary Wood.

Buckley will be taking part in future HS-LA drop in sessions. HS-LA offers monthly sessions aiming to help demystify the industry to those looking for a way in. She will also be giving a second read to the applications to the ’So Close Sessions’ (a chance for authors who have several near misses to get feedback on their submissions) run by HS-LA.

She said: “I am delighted to be joining Hannah at the Hannah Sheppard Literary Agency. I have known Hannah for a number of years and have long admired her commercial taste, commitment to her authors and the work she is doing to demystify the industry and dismantle barriers to publishing.

“Over the last three years I have deeply missed working with books and authors and I couldn’t be more excited to be back in publishing, working with Hannah going forward.”

She can be reached on Louise@hs-la.com.