We're extremely excited to announce that Claire Paterson Conrad, Director of J&N UK's London office, has been shortlisted for Agent of the Year at this year's British Book Awards, affectionately known as the Nibbies. The judges said of their decision:  Janklow & Nesbit’s UK agency turns 25 this year, and Claire Paterson Conrad has shaped its identity and success. She’s a fierce advocate for her authors, but her experience at publishers has given her a keen appreciation of editors’ needs too. Clients with big hits in 2024 included Gillian Anderson, Oliver Burkeman and Neneh Cherry. “She’s the perfect literary companion,” said one author. Claire is shortlisted alongside her author Gillian Anderson whose smash-hit WANT is up for gongs in not one but two categories at this year's Awards — Book of the Year: Non-Fiction: Narrative and Book of the Year: Audiobook: Non-Fiction. The winners in all categories will be announced in a ceremony on 12th May at Grosvenor House. You can see the full list of books that made the cut in all categories for Book of the Year here and the Trade categories here.  We wish Claire and Gillian the best of luck on the night! 🤞

It's fantastic to see Janklow client Helen Czerski shortlisted for the inaugural Unwin Award 2025! Helen, author of BLUE MACHINE, — published by Penguin in 2023 and winner of the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Conservation — has been nominated for the way she uses data to "highlight ocean science literacy and the vital role the seas play in sustaining life". The Unwin Award is a new, annual literary award administered by The Publishers Association, recognising non-fiction authors in the earlier stages of their careers as authors whose work is considered to have made a significant contribution to the world. The Unwin Award is intended to champion and showcase the value of the UK publishing industry to the world. The Unwin Award has been made possible following a donation from the Unwin Charitable Trust. Worth £10,000, The Unwin Award will be awarded to the author for their overall body of work, rather than being associated with a specific title. The award is judged by an independent panel of judges — chaired by professor Shahidha Bari, who is joined by Waterstones non-fiction buyer John Cotterill, as well as social entrepreneur and author Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE — with the winner announced at a ceremony in April. You can read about the remainder of the shortlist here.  Congratulations, Helen and good luck! 🏆

We are thrilled to be launching the Janklow & Nesbit UK Fiction Prize 2025 – in celebration of our UK office’s 25th year – and we are looking exclusively for literary love stories. We are seeking literary fiction with a romantic plot at its core. We’re very proud to represent a number of authors who do just this: André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (“This novel is hot. A love letter.”); Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey (“A modern day Heartburn”); Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia (“An Intergalactic Odyssey of Love”); Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (“moving, human, and challenging”); Less by Andrew Sean Greer (“read and weep"), to name a few.* The winning prize will be presented to a first-time writer whose submission demonstrates excellent literary talent in an exquisitely-told love story. The winner will receive a prize fund of £2,000, a one-to-one session with the Executive Publisher at Sceptre Books, and will be supported by Janklow & Nesbit UK in writing to the end of their novel with an offer of representation. Learn more (including full Ts & Cs) at the 'Prize' page here. We can't wait to read your work! 

We couldn’t be more thrilled to celebrate that Neneh Cherry's beautiful memoir A THOUSAND THREADS, published in October 2024 by Fern Press, has been longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction! A THOUSAND THREADS, which was crowned The Sunday Times' Music Book of the Year, is longlisted alongside 16 authors, 11 of whom are British, in contention for this year’s £30,000 prize, which was launched last year to redress the gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes in the UK. The longlisted titles “boast so many different disciplines and genres”, said journalist Kavita Puri, who is this year’s judging chair. “What unites them all is the quality of the writing, the authority of the voice and the originality of their storytelling, and just the depth and incisiveness of the research.” While the selected books are “all quite different”, said Puri, themes that emerged were “power and control – how it’s used, how it’s abused”, injustice, human connections “with each other, but also the natural world” and climate change. The shortlist of six books will be announced on 26 March, with the winner revealed on 12 June, alongside the winner of the fiction prize, which turns 30 this year. The nonfiction prize was announced in 2023 following research which found that only 35.5% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the prior decade were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes. Given that “female writers in the nonfiction area don’t do as well” as their male counterparts in terms of book advances and newspaper coverage, Puri sees this prize as an opportunity to “elevate brilliant female writing in a whole array of genres”. Women’s perspectives on the “most pressing” issues of the day “need to be heard”, she added. “So there is a huge need for this prize today”. This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. Alongside Puri on the judging panel are the writers Leah Broad, Elizabeth Buchan, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Emma Gannon. The inaugural nonfiction prize was won by Naomi Klein for her book Doppelganger.

It was announced today that 4th Estate (UK) and Knopf (US) will publish a new nonfiction work by Joan Didion. NOTES TO JOHN is an electrifying, previously unpublished work - a moving and profound journal written to her husband John Gregory Dunne.The book will be published in hardcover, eBook and audio on 22 April 2025. ✒️Discovered in a portable filing cabinet next to Didion’s desk after her death, Notes to John is a journal in which she describes sessions with a psychiatrist. The reports are addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.NOTES TO JOHN opens in December 1999, shortly after Didion began seeing the psychiatrist. As she wrote to a friend, her family had been having “a rough few years.” For several months, she recorded the sessions with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.” The conversations were central to Didion’s understanding of the themes she turned to in her brilliant late works, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.The hardback cover features a portrait of Joan Didion in her office taken by acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz.