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Emmanuel Omodeinde

I joined David Higham Associates in August 2022 and worked as an assistant in the film/TV department for almost two years before joining the books department to assist Nicola Chang. I previously worked in publishing in various roles including as an assistant in a literary scouting agency and an editorial assistant at a publishing house.

I’m largely a reader of  literary fiction and non-fiction. In fiction, I love grounded relationship dramas: emotionally rich and powerful stories of couples, families, and friends, especially if they’re a vehicle to explore broader social and political themes. I relish an imaginative approach to form and structure, whether that’s a merging of prose and poetry or an interesting use of narrative perspectives, vignettes, and fragments like Zadie Smith’s NW. I also have an affinity for literary fiction with subtle speculative, science-fiction or fantasy/magical realist elements – Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds is a recent example and the work of Ben Okri, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ted Chiang.

In non-fiction, I love precise writing with a literary flair in polemics, essay collections, memoirs, biographies, and arts criticism. I enjoy the work of journalists/critics such as Doreen St. Felix, Hannah Giorgis, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Harmony Holiday, and Wesley Morris, and academics/theorists like Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman. I’ve recently enjoyed books like Nadia Owusu’s memoir, Aftershocks, Elizabeth Hinton’s history/polemic, America on Fire, Hanif Abdurraquib’s essay collection, A Little Devil in America, and Les Payne’s biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising.