THIS WEEK


THÉRÈSE COEN: “WHO IS BETTER PLACED TO SELL


A BOOK AROUND THE WORLD THAN THE AGENT CLOSEST TO IT?”


London Book Fair Preview Susanna Lea Associates


Coen outlines her plan to give Susanna Lea Associates a bigger UK presence


Thérèse Coen moved over from Hardman & Swainson a year and a half ago to run SLA’s UK office. She now has her sights set on growing the company’s presence


T


Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan


08 23rd February 2024


he view from the Susanna Lea Associates Somerset House office is one that if you saw it through a window in a movie you would scoff, as the set designer had clearly constructed a backdrop of stereotpical London implausibilit. It looks out on the Thames at the particular bend in the river where at a glance you can see the South Bank, the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. It would be like peering out of the SLA headquarters in Paris and expecting to see the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Pyramide du Louvre grouped together. Maybe the view’s almost garish Londonness is something of an aide-memoire for Thérèse Coen as part


of her remit when she moved over from Hardman & Swainson a year and a half ago to run the SLA UK office was to ramp up the agency’s British business. The London office was set up in 2007, seven years aſter Susanna Lea opened her titular company in Paris at a time when French publishers were openly hostile to agents. That Lea is British undoubtedly added a bit of frisson to her entrée into Parisian deal-making. The SLA New York outpost—led since 2020 by Stephanie Cabot—was launched in 2004. Coen says: “SLA is well-established in France; some of the biggest French authors ever are represented by the Paris office. And we have an increasingly strong presence in the US. What I’m trying to do is geting us to that next level. Part of that is having a varied list. I’ve come in with books ranging from literary to commercial fiction, non-fiction and children’s books, a lot of which— the last of which in particular—we really hadn’t had in this office before.”


Coen hit the ground running with a string of eye-catching deals including Lavina Mehta’s


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