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The Good Literary Agency founders 'heartbroken' to close agency after funding bid 'fails'
The Good Literary Agency (TGLA) will close at the end of March with all staff, including agents, being made redundant.
Co-founders Julia Kingsford and Nikesh Shukla said they had tried to save the business but “failed” to be awarded additional funding they applied for. The founders said that, despite cutbacks and a restructure, they had taken the "heartbreaking" decision to close the agency.
All book contracts and all future earnings will revert to their authors and TGLA said it will work with publishers to transfer them over the coming months.
Amandeep Singh and Kerry-Ann Bentley, who joined as literary agents in 2023, and agency assistant Arden Jones are among those being made redundant.
TGLA was founded as a social enterprise agency for British writers from under-represented backgrounds in 2018. It was launched with an initial three years’ worth of funding by Arts Council England as part of their Ambition for Excellence programme and later became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.
Kingsford said: "TGLA came about because we wanted to change two things: for there to be more opportunities for marginalised writers to break through and for accountability for the industry’s shortcomings on diverse publishing to shift, ensuring that no one could say that they didn’t publish more diversely because the writers weren’t there."
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"We wanted to provide a place where authors could submit and know they would be seen (and responded to), to invest in agents and create career pathways to vitally increase the diversity of the gatekeeping workforce and to collaborate with the industry to implement lasting change across the board."
She added: "We are immensely proud to have been part of an incredible, informal collective of organisations and individuals who have prioritised helping drive change across the industry, and we are proud of everything we’ve achieved. We also know the work we wanted to do is not complete and we are heartbroken at having to make this very difficult decision to stop doing this work at a time when it continues to be so needed."
Kingsford said that, despite ongoing funding as an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, the business has been “feeling the effects of publisher investment in authors becoming more and more squeezed each year we’ve been operating”.
She said the business has applied for funding elsewhere but not been successful. "We’ve cut back and restructured. It is time for TGLA to pass the baton of the work that we do firmly back to the publishing industry as a whole, and we believe in the ability of the industry to pick that work up," she said.
Shukla said: "We started the agency out of a desire to do something concrete to help marginalised writers on their road to publication. A lot of handwringing tweets and mea culpa articles and desires to do better, and nothing felt like it was changing fast. I’m so proud of what we did as an agency, through helping writers, either through advice and feedback, or on their publication journey, through bringing people into the industry and helping them develop their agenting skills and building their lists, through being an example of what could be."
He added: "We didn’t always get everything right, we couldn’t represent everyone we wanted to, we were sometimes hampered by the capacity of a small team, a culture war or two, a pandemic, an industry that assumed itself to be doing the work, money, our other professional journeys, but we did the best we could. While we’re closing, and I’m devastated that we have to do this, we turn to the industry and ask you: what are you going to do now we’re not here to pick up your slack? What are you going to do differently? What are you willing to give up? What are you willing to change? We’ve already seen the rolling back of diversity initiatives throughout this industry and other creative industries, and that alarms me. I want us all to do better. We can do better."
The agency has represented more than 200 authors including Raymond Antrobus, Saima Mir, Jon Ransom, Alex Wheatle, Nikita Gill, Hafsa Zayyan, Monika Radojevic, Kenny Imafidon, Patrick Gallagher, Ebinehita Iyere, Saba Sams, Mikaela Loach, Kimberly Whittam, Bethany Handley, Lizzie Huxley-Jones, Leone Ross, Jacqueline Crooks and Musa Okwonga.
Agents who previously worked at TGLA include Nicola Chang (DHA), Salma Begum (Greyhound Literary), Abi Fellows (DHH), Callen Martin (Bell Lomax Moreton), Gyamfia Osei (ANA) and Kemi Ogunsanwo (Seventh Agency).
Kingsford said: "When we first contemplated closure we knew we weren’t alone in feeling there was a stalling across the industry’s diversity and inclusion journey but we hadn’t expected it to be laid out so boldly at the very moments we were writing our closure plans. We know the recent report from CLPE on the retraction in diversity in children’s publishing would be echoed across adult publishing too if that data was tracked. The Publishing Association recent report on the publishing workforce has shown a retraction in staff diversity too. We uphold what was said by Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Zaahida Nabagereka, Fen Coles, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor in their responses to the CLPE report: publishers are investing less and offering less support and this is falling hardest, as it always does, on those already systemically marginalised. This must be a moment for the industry to take stock and urgently redress that."
