Interview: Bristol literary agent Kate Johnson

Bristol is home to Kate Johnson, a literary agent with New York’s Wolf Literary Services. Joe Melia found out what Bristol’s lit scene looks like to this New Yorker – and what she looks for in a submission.

So, Kate, what brought you from New York to Bristol?
Love! The simplified version is that my husband had moved to New York for me, and when he got a job in the UK, it was my turn. Thankfully, I was ready for a shakeup. Although I hadn’t visited Bristol before we moved, I did Google-search the coffee shops, which felt like sufficient research.

You have moved here from one of the world’s most literary cities. How does Bristol’s literary scene compare?
I’m consistently stunned by the genuine, engaged readers and writers in a Bristol audience. One of my first bookish activities here was seeing novelist/short story writer Kirsty Logan at a very intimate round-table talk at Spike Island. It was a special event, and Spike’s Novel Writers series is terrific – but there are plenty more like it around Bristol. I think being outside of an industry hub means that most people attend literary events purely for pleasure, rather than work.
One major difference is that things start precisely on time in Bristol – I guess because there’s no subway to blame? – so it took about a year for me to stop being (un)fashionably late.

What is the role of a literary agent?
The basic job description is that I find good books and then find good publishers for those books, and negotiate the best deal possible for the writer (and from there, carry on the matchmaking for audio, film, foreign rights, etcetera).
I help my authors to navigate the publication process and to develop their writing careers. But my role is unique for each of them, depending on what they/the specific project needs: I’m also a beta reader, cheerleader, editor, hand holder, first-question-from-the-audience-asker, deadline-nagger, provider of motivational coffee and celebratory champagne.

And what kinds of books/genres/writers are you looking to represent?
I represent a mix of literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, and I’d say that in both genres I look for authentic voices and stories that reveal something strange in the everyday or, conversely, something relatable in the extraordinary.
With fiction, I’m drawn to global stories and underrepresented voices, psychological investigations, moral ambiguity, dark humour, a strong sense of place, and diverse, convincing characters.
With non-fiction, I’m interested in food, running, feminism, obsessives, humour, unconventional families, cultural history, art, travel, mental health, medicine, and the environment – but I like to be surprised. All the better if a book about something I’d assumed was dreadfully dull can capture my attention.

What would your dream manuscript look like?
I want a story that feels both urgent and timeless. And, in the wake of Brexit, Trump, and this new closing in on ourselves, storytelling that breaks down walls and builds empathy becomes that much more important: stories can show a reader new worlds, and let us recognize ourselves in characters from other languages and lands.
As lofty as it sounds, I’d like everything I work on to in some way help us resist a too narrow vision of the world. If a manuscript can do that, and make me laugh and cry on alternate pages, and make me stay up all night to finish it, that’s the dream come true.

How soon can you tell whether a submission is for you?
Some manuscripts are maybes for a while, but more often than not, it’s a love-at-first-read kind of thing. Plot and character are crucial, of course, but it’s the voice that will either draw me in or push me away immediately. Whether in first or third person, I want a narrator with a distinct and provocative way of looking at the world.

Which forthcoming books from writers you represent are you really excited about?
Next month brings the UK edition of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell, which Helen Oyeyemi called “a wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book” (I consider this high praise.) It’s about a Korean-American woman who learns that her adoptive brother has killed himself, and travels to her estranged parents’ home in the Midwest to “investigate” the death. It’s hilarious, absurd, and devastating.
May also brings a new collection of work by Bristol’s own Tania Hershman, called Some of Us Glow More Than Others. Influenced by her background in the science world, the stories are incandescent, tender and always surprising.

And in October, there’ll be a domestic noir called Beneath the Skin by Caroline England, about four Manchester couples and the consequences of their secrets, large and small. These books could not sound more different, but all three writers share an uncanny knack for observing human behaviour, in all of our strangeness and stupidity and good intentions.
On the non-fiction side, Mugambi Jouet’s Exceptional America, about how polarized Americans are from each other, and from the rest of the Western world, has just been published – sadly it becomes more and more relevant. And an utterly charming and insightful biography/cultural history comes this fall from Joanna Scutts (a Londoner I met in Manhattan), titled The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Hillis wrote a series of self-help books for single women in the 1930s, encouraging them to shed labels like “spinster” and “old maid,” and instead embrace solo negligée-wearing and the joy of breakfast in bed (alone). Scutts’s take on her is a delight.
And one more book to anticipate comes not from a client, but a friend and fellow North American Bristolian, Gillian Best. Her debut novel The Last Wave – a tragicomic portrait of family life set on the south coast of England – comes out this month, and I’ll be in conversation with her at the Spike Island launch on April 20.

Read more about Kate and Wolf Literary Services at www.wolflit.com/about