Harriet Moore
harrietmoore@davidhigham.co.uk
Harriet represents literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and poetry. Harriet is mostly looking for new fiction at the moment.
If you would like to submit your work to Harriet, please email harrietsubmissions@davidhigham.co.uk with a covering letter in the body of your email and sample material attached separately (the first three chapters of a novel, a non-fiction book proposal, or a selection of poems).
In fiction Harriet admires clarity, energy, emotional candour, intense interior or domestic portraits, close observation, texture, craft and compression. Some examples: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies; Amina Cain’s Indelicacy; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding; Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton; all Marilynne Robinson; the short stories of Joy Williams, Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill.
In non-fiction she is interested in creative scholarship; intellectual and artistic endeavour; books which vibrantly engage with archival work, biography, history, criticism and private experience. Good examples are: the writings of John Berger; Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman; Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson; Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering; Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives; and precise, vivid memoir writing like Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story; Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City; Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon; and Margo Jefferson’s Negroland. The fresh and radical possibilities of these forms.
In poetry she is looking for what her author Nuar Alsadir defines as “an authentic conversation with your audience or your self”. Alsadir’s collection Fourth Person Singular is a good example of this. As is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen; Noelle Kocot‘s Phantom Pains of Madness; Selima Hill’s Bunny; Denise Riley’s Say Something Back; Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip; Solmaz Sharif’s Look.
In all forms she is interested in how writing and visual art correspond, and a scholarly attention to the ordinary and everyday.
Her authors have been Sunday Times bestsellers and have won or been nominated for prizes such as the Booker Prize, the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and The White Review Short Story Prize. They are published in a range of publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, The White Review and The Stinging Fly. Harriet was selected as a Bookseller Rising Star in 2019.
Please send any enquiries about or for her authors to Sophia Rahim at sophiarahim@davidhigham.co.uk.
Harriet is currently open to submissions.
