Harriet Moore

I joined Aitken Alexander Associates in 2024 after over a decade at David Higham Associates. I represent literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and poetry. 

My authors include three out of the selected 20 Granta Best of Young British novelists 2023: the 2023 Giller Prize-winner and Booker Prize-shortlisted Sarah Bernstein; Booker Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted Sophie Mackintosh; and debut novelist Jennifer Atkins. I also represent the 2024 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient and Gordon Burn Prize-winner Kathryn Scanlan, the Sunday Times bestseller and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlistee Naoise Dolan, the B&N 2024 Discover Prize Finalist Lottie Hazell, the Nero Book Awards 2024 shortlisted Jo Hamya and authors of invigorating and acclaimed literary novels such as Eliza Barry Callahan, Marlowe Granados and Hannah Regel. 

I am drawn to novels which have clarity, energy, texture and emotional candour—what Edna O’Brien called “the imaginative truth”. Also, sentences which are tactile and idiosyncratic often with an unusual devotion to the paraphernalia of daily life. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha is a favourite novel of mine, she does this brilliantly.  I am always interested in domestic or interior portraits, small-town plots, campus plots, marriage plots, wretched love stories, mothers and daughters, ominous atmospheres, family gatherings, parties. I recently sold Brodie Crellin’s debut novel A Sense of Occasion in a pre-empt to Jonathan Cape who described the author as having “a brilliant ear for dialogue and an acute understanding of the complicated truths all relationships contain…like the very best of classic British social novelists, but with an entirely modern take on the world”—this expresses beautifully what I am looking for in fiction! Other good examples include: the oeuvres of Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, and Elena Ferrante; Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach; Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed; Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had; Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation;  Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These; and Laurie Colwin’s Happy All The Time.

My non-fiction has a focus on literary biography, social, cultural (and oral) history, and vernacular or creative scholarship. Particularly writers who come at these genres with fresh and revisionist methodologies, books which vibrantly engage with archival work and private experience. My author Harriet Baker‘s acclaimed Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann acquired at auction by Allen Lane; a history of the female body—both personal and collective—by writer, historian, and regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, Erin Maglaque, which I recently sold to Jonathan Cape; and my author Rebecca May Johnson, who is forging a new food philosophy with the critically acclaimed Small Fires, which was shortlisted for Foyles Non-fiction Book of the Year in 2022, and the forthcoming Meal Time which Jonathan Cape acquired at auction on the pleasures and politics of eating are good examples of this; as are the writings of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Janet Malcolm and Kate Briggs. I also enjoy precise, vivid memoir writing in the vein of Annie Ernaux, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginzburg and Tove Ditlevsen, and am invested in Alison Light’s “questions about the nature of memoir and the kind of history that it gives us, a history from inside.” My areas of special interest are art, psychology, how we eat and dress, women’s lives and maternal subjectivity. 

I represent a select list of poets which includes Jason Allen-Paisant, the winner of the 2023 T S Eliot Prize and 2023 Forward Prize; Forward Prize-shortlisted Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Sophie Collins, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Oli Hazzard, Sandeep Parmar, and Jack Underwood. I look for surprising intonation and book-length narrative poems/projects rather than selected poems (and often the poets I represent are working on prose projects too—I am very fond of prose by poets). I recently enjoyed Sylvia Legris’ Garden Physic and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day.

In all forms I am looking for work which combines intellect, politics, and feeling; books which offer a vocabulary and philosophy for living, a scholarly attention to the ordinary and everyday, new possibilities for intimacy and the imagination; and writers who are invested in how we relate and communicate to one another.

My authors are published in a range of publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Granta, The White Review and The Stinging Fly.

Please email me with any queries regarding my authors and their work at: harriet@aitkenalexander.co.uk. Please do not submit unsolicited work directly to me. Our submissions guidelines can be found here.