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About us
The Early Years
The Sayle Literary Agency (now run by Rachel Calder) has a long and distinguished history. It was founded at the turn of the 20th century by one of the first literary agents in London, J B Pinker, and the first who considered himself an author’s agent, that is he was an agent whose allegiance was absolutely to the authors he represented and not just acting as a deal broker. His speciality was in nurturing new literary talent and in the early years Pinker looked after the literary affairs of Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, and Arnold Bennett. After Pinker’s death, the agency was taken over and renamed by the subsequent owners, Richard Steele, Hope Leresche and then Tessa Sayle in the 70s and 80s, and continued to represent the best British and international writers, including D H Lawrence, James Joyce, Rosamund Lehmann, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and William Styron and Brendan Behan.
Today
Rachel Calder joined the agency in 1991 from
Curtis Brown and assumed sole responsibility for the agency a couple
of years later after the untimely deaths of Tessa Sayle and Penny Tackaberry. She
is a Board member of the New
Writing Partnership (Norwich based Arts Council funded arts organisation
supporting new writing) and is on the Committee of the Cambridge
Wordfest.
In keeping with the original ethos of the agency, we have always remained
small and we concentrate on representing our established writers and
expanding the availability of their work in all markets as well as nurturing
new writers, bringing new and fresh voices to the reading public. We
work closely with all our authors to make sure that all the manuscripts
we submit for them are as polished and brilliant as they can be so that
the books have the best chance possible to succeed in a very competitive
publishing environment.
Our current roster of wonderful authors have won many prizes and accolades,
spent weeks on bestseller lists in the UK and all over the world, broken
extraordinary news stories, told terrifying tales, filled hearts with
joy and changed the way their readers think of the world.
In order that we offer our authors the very best skills and services
available, we use specialist co-agents to sell rights to our books in
the foreign language markets, in the USA and for film and TV.
USA rights: Dunow Carlson & Lerner
Literary Agency, New York www.dclagency.com
Foreign rights: The Marsh Agency, London.
www.marsh-agency.co.uk
Film and TV rights are usually handled by Sayle Screen.
www.saylescreen.com
Our commission rates are:
Home - 15%
US, Canada, Translation, Audio, Film and TV - 20%