I am presently open to fiction and non-fiction submissions.

I love reading new work and discovering emerging writers. There is nothing more enlivening than encountering a new voice, thinking seriously and playfully on the page, and a writer who has a sense of how their work might make its way into the world in the form a book.

I sell directly to publishers in the UK and North America and, being part of a large, established agency, I am fortunate to work alongside a dedicated and experienced team of translation rights agents and film and TV rights agents who are passionate about ensuring my authors’ work reaches as many readers—and audiences—as possible around the rest of the world.

If you would like to submit your work to me, please send a covering letter in the body of your email and attach the first three chapters of your novel or a couple of short stories to nicolasubmissions@davidhigham.co.uk. Please attach the material as a Word document, not a PDF.

For non-fiction, please submit a cover letter, proposal and some sample material. For poetry, I am selectively considering book-length collections and/or poets who are also writing prose. I am also open to hearing from published authors who are looking for a change in approach or strategy.

Please do not submit directly to my assistant, Emmanuel Omodeinde, unless you have been referred or recommended or you are already published.

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I joined DHA in 2020 and I represent prize-winning writers of literary and general fiction, non-fiction and poets. My authors include Sara Ahmed, Raymond Antrobus, J. M. Coetzee, Jacqueline Crooks, Gabriel Krauze, Saba Sams and Kae Tempest. I am proud to represent two authors on this decade’s Granta Best of Young British Novelists: Saba Sams and Anna Metcalfe, both of whom were first published as writers of short stories, another form of fiction I love. Other poets I represent include Nikita Gill, Will Harris, Bhanu Kapil and Momtaza Mehri.

My authors have won or been nominated for many prizes, including the BBC National Short Story Award, Booker Prize, Costa Book Awards (now Nero), Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Edge Hill Prize, Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Forward Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, Granta Best of Young British Novelists, Jhalak Prize, Orwell Prize, Sunday Times Short Story Award, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Ted Hughes Award, T. S. Eliot Prize, Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, White Review Poet’s Prize, White Review Short Story Prize, Windham Campbell Prize, Whiting Grant, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Writers’ Prize (formerly Rathbones Folio).

For me, the most interesting writers are those who are trying to understand life and society and get at the truth of experience as it is felt. An original voice is what I respond to first and foremost. Writers who are unlike others and who are challenging the idea of what a literary novel—and sentence—is and can do really excite me. By the same token, I am interested in story and narrative; the level of craft and technique required to make a novel flow without compromising on its sentences is not to be underestimated. I love the feeling of total immersion in a book—to be swept up in the lives of its characters, its texture, and what’s happening, as much as its ideas and its language—of wanting to steal away to get back to the world of the book, which is very hard to do with two young children. Recently, I have been delving back into the archive and have loved Possession by A.S. Byatt and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann for their scale, imagination and intelligence.

In non-fiction I am interested in narrative-driven, persuasive perspectives, a unique, fearless voice and the interplay between the personal and the political—I am always thinking about power, class and culture and how new ideas and theories can be put to a reader in a captivating way. I would love to hear from early career scholars, researchers, journalists and critics who are thinking deeply, universally and urgently about what it means to be alive now, even, or should I say especially, if they are using history and the archive to illuminate the present moment. If they can do this provocatively and humorously, then all the better. I relish helping writers and thinkers to develop their ideas into book proposals so don’t worry if your idea isn’t yet fully formed.

I also represent some literary memoir and am interested in the uncanny space between fiction and non-fiction that this genre (as well as the genres of “auto-fiction” and the non-fiction novel) can excavate. Indeed several of the fiction writers and poets I represent play in this twilight zone.

I am a huge fan of and own many cookbooks. I would love to find a writer—like Fuchsia Dunlop—who can write both books about food and cookbooks.

Above all, I am looking for writers who demonstrate potential and flair but who also have a vision for what it is they want to achieve on the page and are committed to trying to realise it. I work carefully and closely with writers on their manuscripts in preparation for submission to publishers and enjoy the conversations which arise from this process enormously. George Saunders puts it wonderfully when he talks about helping writers achieve their “iconic space”. This is my aspiration for all the writers I represent; that in the work we do together combined with the ceasless advocacy literary representation entails, a writer can achieve their iconic space, be palpably and defiantly themselves, and their work take its truest and best form.

I am lucky to be assisted by Emmanuel Omodeinde. Please direct any queries to him.