Spring 2006
Activity of all sorts at Edinburgh-based agency Jenny Brown Associates. The company move into new offices in the city’s Marchmont area this week while their membership of the AAA was ratified at the association’s last meeting.
JBA are also delighted to announce that Lucy Juckes joins the company to develop a children’s list. Juckes was co-founder and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, the children’s publisher specialising in books for reluctant readers. She was previously Sales Director of Bloomsbury, and has also worked for the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Meanwhile, Mark Stanton (Stan) reports several new deals. A biography of Britain’s highest placed cyclist in the Tour de France, Robert Millar, and an autobiography of Leicester City, Celtic and Northern Ireland footballer Neil Lennon both go to Michael Doggart at HarperSport.
Fiery and combatant on-field – off-field highly intelligent and articulate – Lennon will assail the religious bigotry which has soured his time in Scotland. The first Roman Catholic to be chosen to captain his country, Lennon was forced to dramatically quit that captaincy before he even took the field after death threats were made against him by Loyalist paramilitaries. For the first time, he will give his version of the events which sickened world football and led him to quit the international stage.
Robert Millar is Britain’s best ever cyclist, and is surely among the most enigmatic, complex and contradictory of athletes in any sport. He came from one of Europe’s most industrialised cities, Glasgow, to excel in the most unlikely terrain - over the high mountain passes of the Pyrenees and Alps. He was crowned King of the Mountains during the 1984 Tour de France, and remains the only Briton ever to finish on the podium of the world’s toughest race. At present his whereabouts are unknown. Fromer cyclist and freelance journalist Richard Moore makes his debut with the book: entitled In Search of Robert Millar.
Another football autobiography goes to David Wilson at Headline. Alan Rough, the Scottish goalkeeper who went to three world cups and now works as a broadcaster on Scotland’s most listened to commercial station, was a stalwart at Partick Thistle. Coincidentally, Wilson himself is an avowed Thistle fan. The book – provisionally entitled The Rough with the Smooth – will be published in November this year.
Finally, Edinburgh-based Polygon – originators of the Sandy McCall Smith No.1 Ladies series – continues to strengthen its crime list. The publishers have paid a substantial five figure sum – their biggest ever advance - for more Scottish penned crime. Hugh Andrew has lined up the next three novels by Waterstone’s employee Allan Guthrie – whose novel Kiss Her Goodbye has just been nominated for an Edgar award. The novel – published by Hard Case Crime in the US, will be published in April by Polygon- with the first novel in the new deal – Hard Man – following in Spring 07.
Hugh Andrew says, “We are absolutely delighted to have signed Allan. It’s a measure both of the ambition and Polygon and of Allan’s confidence in us that we have been able to sign such an exciting new talent.”
Guthrie joined JBA as an agent – as well as a client – just before Christmas 06. He specialises in crime noir, and is taking on a small number of UK and US writers.
Posted on Apr 03, 2006 - 11:23 PM