Pérez to launch new literary agency

After three years at Zeno Agency, Kristina Pérez is launching a new agency, Pérez Literary & Entertainment (PLE). 

The agency launches with 15 authors including Alexia Casale, Josh Winning and Sharon Emmerichs, as well as US publisher of science fiction and fantasy, Arc Manor Books.

Pérez represents a wide range of fiction – from YA and horror to book club – as well as serious non-fiction. As a New Yorker based in London, the new agency will consider both the US and UK as its home markets. The agency will also represent select literature in translation starting with the Spanish language. 

Before becoming a literary agent, Pérez worked as a journalist and earned a PhD in Medieval Literature from the University of Cambridge. She has published several YA novels and non-fiction, and her upmarket adult début The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins will be published by Constable in April 2024. 

Pérez said of her new venture: “Being both an agent and author gives me a unique perspective as I guide my clients through the publishing process. Launching my own business has long been a dream of mine and I am grateful to my clients for taking the leap with me. PLE is committed to building careers book by book, story by story. I can’t think of a better way to start the new year.”

Among the titles out this year from Pérez’s clients are Sharon Emmerichs’ Shield Maiden (Head of Zeus) which debuted as a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller and Alexia Casale’s latest YA novel, Sing If You Can’t Dance (Faber). Casale’s adult debut, The Best Way to Bury Your Husband sold in a major deal to Viking UK and is due out next year. Josh Winning’s debut The Shadow Glass (Titan) was one of Waterstones Paperbacks of the Year 2022 and the Times’ SF Book of the Month for April 2022; his first horror novel, Burn the Negative, will publish with Putnam US this summer.