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Hannah Brattesani, Agent & Foreign Rights Director

Why did the Scot cross the pond?

Out of spite. Mostly.

Freshly graduated from the University of St Andrews, I’m on the top floor of a RADA building in Bloomsbury, London being interviewed for an MFA in playwriting by a man who, for the sake of this story, looks like a young Tom Stoppard. I’ve just been told something that hurts more than it should, “You’re too green.” Tom ends our interview with an instruction as I exit the door: “Go live!” It takes five creaking flights to get out of the building and five creaking flights for hurt to rise to spite. I spend the afternoon searching for jobs in New York from the coffee shop next door. I’ll show you living!

I begin working for Emma Sweeney Agency, a boutique literary agency which was home to bestselling and beloved authors and helmed by the eponymous Emma Sweeney. From that Upper East Side office, I learn the ropes of the industry and I am first introduced to the international publishing network. While juggling myriad duties at ESA, I also handle contracts for Blue Flower Arts, a speakers bureau whose roster includes Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, George Saunders, Eileen Myles and many more critically acclaimed poets and authors. I learn a lot in that first year; crucially, that there are only 24 hours in a day.

Just six months after a promotion to ESA’s Foreign Rights Director, I am given an opportunity to double up once again, and I step in as the interim Director of International Rights at Folio Literary Management. I go from handling a catalog of twenty titles to ten times that amount; the list encompasses everything from picture books to green juice cookbooks to sweeping historical novels. I add mastering a matinee commute through Times Square to my skillset: elbows out, avoid eye contact, pause for no one.

At the end of my time at Folio, Emma Sweeney retires, and the agency is acquired by Folio. That weekend, I stand in a Barnes & Noble parking lot when my phones rings with a number I don’t recognize. I answer. “It’s Molly Friedrich. I heard you’re looking for a job.” The whole thing would feel like divine intervention if it weren’t happening next to the New Jersey turnpike.

I join Friedrich as an agent and Director of International Rights at the end of 2019 and have been cultivating a list of literary and upmarket fiction and voice-driven non-fiction ever since. Tom Stoppard – real or otherwise – has yet to get in touch.

Five non-agency books that I loved: FEVER DREAM, CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, HOW TO BE BOTH, anything by Rebecca Solnit, and THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US.

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Q&A

What was a book that represented your childhood, teenage years, and adult life (so far)?

I was (still am) obsessed with Angela Carter. I read Wise Children when I was eleven and understood, at best, 60% of it. It taught me that a book could be a stratified thing, that reading could be an excavation. I read it again at sixteen and finally at twenty. Each time it felt like a different book.

I should also mention Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which left a mark on me at thirteen. It was the first book I had read that bluntly explored womanhood – really, the concept of a “prime” – and warned of treating an education, wherever you get it, as doctrine. Plus, it’s fun to say “crème de la crème” in an Edinburgh accent.

2. What was a book that you ended up loving without expecting to?

Hervé le Tellier’s The Anomaly. I read it on the recommendation of my French book club and was blown away. It has everything I dislike – many POVs, a plane crash at the center, conspiracy theories – but the book oozed charm. It’s so intelligently written and endless praise should go to Adriana Hunter for her impeccable translation

3. What books are on your nightstand?

It’s a rotating selection but as of late 2022, here’s what’s piled up next to me:

• Breasts & Eggs by Meiko Kawakami

• Sorrow & Bliss by Meg Mason

• The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

• In Every Mirror she’s Black by Lola Akinmade Åkerström

• Disturbance by Philippe Lançon

• Very Important People by Ashley Mears

• Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles

If it counts, Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight has a permanent fixture on my desk (as well as this Emily Flake cartoon.)

4. Favorite bookstore you visited?

Albertine is going to start charging me rent soon, I’m there so often. I often follow it with a trip to Argosy to buy some cheap prints and leaf through some old books in the catacomb-like library downstairs.

Libreria Marcopolo in Venice has a special place in my heart because I bought Venice is a Fish by Tiziano Scarpa there which should absolutely be compulsory reading for anyone even thinking about going to Venice. You won’t find a better, more beautiful guide and a more thoughtfully curated bookshop.

And a final, special shoutout to the Waterstones on Edinburgh’s Princes Street where I used to force my high school boyfriends to take me on dates.

5. Last book that made you cry?

I try to avoid books that make me cry but, alas, Shuggie Bain had me bawling.

6. What are you NOT looking for?

Here are some things that I often see in my inbox which aren’t my cup of tea:

• Speculative or sci-fi

• Satire

• High fantasy (though I like fantasy elements in fiction)

• Female characters who are exoticized or have no real agency of their own

• Military thrillers

• Epistolary novel