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Harriet Moore

I am drawn to novels which have clarity, energy, texture and emotional candour. Sentences which are tactile and idiosyncratic often with an unusual devotion to the paraphernalia of daily life. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha is a favourite novel of mine, she does this brilliantly. As does Alice Munro in Lives of Girls and Women and her short fiction. I am always interested in interior or domestic portraits, small-town plots, campus plots, marriage plots, wretched love stories, mothers and daughters, ominous atmospheres. Good examples include: the oeuvres of Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson and Elena Ferrante; Elif Batuman’s Either/Or; Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had; Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation; Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

My non-fiction has a focus on literary biography, social, cultural (and oral) history, and vernacular or creative scholarship. Particularly writers who come at these genres with fresh and revisionist methodologies, books which vibrantly engage with archival work and private experience. The writings of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Janet Malcolm, Alison Light, and Kate Briggs are good examples of this. I also enjoy precise, vivid memoir writing in the vein of Annie Ernaux, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginzburg and Tove Ditlevsen. My areas of special interest are art, psychology, how we eat and dress, women’s lives and maternal subjectivity. I am also interested in narrative true crime writing such as Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary, Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, and the trial narratives of Helen Garner.

I also represent a select list of poets. I look for what my author Nuar Alsadir defines as “an authentic conversation with your audience or your self”; surprising intonation; and book-length narrative poems/projects rather than selected poems. I recently enjoyed Sylvia Legris’ Garden Physic and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day.

In all forms I am looking for work which combines intellect, politics, and feeling; books which offer a vocabulary and philosophy for living, a scholarly attention to the ordinary and everyday, new possibilities for intimacy and the imagination; and writers who are invested in how we relate and communicate to one another; or to use Barthes’ formulation, simply, “How to Live Together.”

Every ten years, ​Granta magazine names their 20 best British novelists under 40, and three of my authors—Jennifer Atkins, Sarah Bernstein and Sophie Mackintosh—were chosen for the list this decade. My authors have been Sunday Times bestsellers and have won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and The Giller Prize; they have been nominated for The Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and The White Review Short Story Prize. They are published in a range of publications including The New YorkerThe Paris ReviewGrantaNOONThe White Review and The Stinging Fly. I was selected as a Bookseller Rising Star in 2019.

I am currently open to submissions, which should be sent to harrietsubmissions@davidhigham.co.uk.

On the lookout for

—big family and/or love stories (all forms of friendship, familial and romantic arrangements)

—literary novelists who engage playfully with other genres such as speculative fiction, horror, crime

—historical fiction which has a contemporary tone/imagination/strangeness

—a modern Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose

—an imaginative literary biography along the lines of Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, or Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

 

On the lookout for

—big family and/or love stories (all forms of friendship, familial and romantic arrangements)

—literary novelists who engage playfully with other genres such as speculative fiction, horror, crime

—historical fiction which has a contemporary tone/imagination/strangeness

—a modern Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose

—an imaginative literary biography along the lines of Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, or Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

 

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