Lizzy Kremer on growing David Higham Associates and protecting her ‘incredible’ authors

The secret to a great agency? Lizzy Kremer leans forward with an almost conspiratorial air and says: “It’s the admin.”

The David Higham Associates (DHA) managing director is only half-joking. The swashbuckling side of agenting matters, of course—the multi-publisher auctions, inking TV and film deals, helping authors on their journeys, which, if luck and skill meet, includes bestseller lists and prizes. But doing the hard work of ensuring authors get paid what is due—which, as any agent or writer will tell you, is rarely straightforward—is the bedrock.

Kremer says: “Part of what originally drew me to DHA was a diligence about the business of agenting. And that means a keen sense of unseen advocacy and active engagement with publishers, plus a kind of fearlessness about asking difficult questions.

“Our authors are incredible creators, but they are also running businesses. We are their business partners and it is our absolute responsibility to protect them and grow that business. So not to be numerate and be able to interrogate the business of publishing seems to me to be derelict. We are known to be conscientious in our contract work and we’re really proud of that culture in the business.”

Kremer and I meet in DHA’s bright, busy Soho offices to chat about the agency with a couple of loose milestones as our jumping-off point. It is almost 90 years since David Higham, Nancy Pearn and Laurence Pollinger left Curtis Brown to set up on their own, and almost 20 years to the day that Kremer moved over from Ed Victor to DHA. She has been the m.d. for the past two years, taking the place of Anthony Goff, who was in the role for a little over two decades and now serves as the chair of the board of directors.

There is also a rebrand of the DHA logo (below) and a shiny new website. Kremer insists this is out of character as “there’s really no emphasis here to be particularly public; we’re not party animals, we’re not press-release merchants”. But she adds: “The rebrand is to try to better reflect who we are, which is very forward-looking and we see ourselves very much at the forefront of conversations with publishers about new technologies, new platforms, new formats and investigating opportunities for authors.”

And having a website that is helpful rather than a barrier to prospective authors is key. “We believe inclusivity is a fundamental business principle as well as a social principle. And there’s no way of being inclusive unless you make yourselves completely accessible to writers. That means being open to submissions, reading those submissions really carefully, making lots of information easily available as to how to contact you and not to be forbidding.” 

That website’s news section does have a lot to shout about of late, and Kremer canters through the highlights. A quarter of Granta’s most recent once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list—Jennifer Atkins, Sarah Bernstein, Sophie Mackintosh, Saba Sams and Anna Metcalfe—are DHA clients, the first three repped by Harriet Moore, the final two by Nicola Chang. There have been gongs aplenty, with poetry particularly fecund. Anthony Joseph and Jason Allen-Paisant won the last two T S Eliot prizes, with Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello also nabbing the Forward Prize, a rare double.

Pitch perfect 

The tills have been ringing for agency bestselling authors such as Mick Herron, Jacqueline Wilson, Liz Pichon and Val McDermid. As might be expected with a 90-year-old agency, the estates side is bountiful, led by Goff’s client Roald Dahl but also featuring the likes of Dorothy L Sayers, Arthur C Clarke and Muriel Spark (Spark once wrote a hilarious, waspish piece about her, at times, combative relations with the agency that included calling Higham “an old wooffie behind moustaches”). But the agents who handle estates are not just letting the backlist money roll in; examples of new clever publishing include Faber’s re-releasing of titles by Celia Fremlin (repped by Maddalena Cavaciuti), which, helped by a Waterstones Thriller of the Month nod, had Uncle Paul hit the bestseller list some 65 years after its original publication.

The film and television side, headed by Nicky Lund, has had a string of adaptations hitting our screens, such as “All of Us Strangers”, the Oscar-nominated film starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, taken from Taichi Yamada’s Strangers. And Kremer says there are currently 90 DHA projects “under option or in negotiation”, including the recently announced Apple TV+ series of Araminta Hall’s Imperfect Women, which will star Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington; and ITV green-lighting a second series of “Karen Pirie” based on McDermid’s novels.