Harriet Moore

I joined Aitken Alexander Associates in 2024 after over a decade at David Higham Associates. I represent fiction, narrative non-fiction, and poetry. I am currently looking for big family and/or love stories (all forms of friendship, familial and romantic arrangements); literary novelists who engage playfully with other genres (e.g. historical fiction which has a contemporary tone/strangeness); and imaginative literary biographies along the lines of Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, or Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. 

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 Sunday Times bestseller and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlistee Naoise Dolan; the 2024 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient and Gordon Burn Prize-winner Kathryn Scanlan; authors of invigorating literary novels such as Marlowe Granados, Jo Hamya, Lottie Hazell and Hannah Regel; and 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.

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. Good examples include: the oeuvres of Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson and Elena Ferrante; Elif Batuman’s Either/Or; Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had; Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation; Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

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, and 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, 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 am also interested in narrative true crime writing such as Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary, Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, and the trial narratives of Helen Garner.

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; 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.