Lewinsohn Literary Agency was founded by Becky Thomas in 2021. It is named after, and as a tribute to, Becky’s maternal Jewish refugee line, and she wants to continue her commitment to represent authors who write from the margins, elevating them to critical and commercial success, with this ethos of legacy, inclusivity and hard work.
Our authors are both bestselling and critically acclaimed, and include winners and nominees of multiple prizes, from the William Hill to the Costa, the CILIP Carnegie Medal to the Ted Hughes Award, the Goldsmiths to the Nibbies. We have a unique speciality in where the literary scene merges with live work, crossing over with the poetry and theatre scenes, podcasts, broadcast and journalism, and tv/film adaptation.
Becky is currently Literary Agent of the Year 2022, awarded at British Book Awards.
As a boutique agency, we can be dynamic, innovative, and hands-on, offering close support and guidance through the industry to all writers we work with. We take the stance of another south east Londoner, David Rocastle: “Remember who you are, what you are, and who you represent”.
We are based in Soho at 58 Old Compton Street, London, W1D 4UF
Becky Thomas
After landing a fluke temping job in 2005 at Faber & Faber, Becky decided faxing Seamus Heaney was infinitely preferable to working in travel insurance above a KFC (her other temping job after finishing her English Literature degree). While there, she spent four years looking after the Estates and unagented poets in the Rights Department, where she learned that she had a knack and passion for negotiation and author care, and that would be the perfect combination to move into agenting. She became Contracts Director at Abner Stein before moving to WME, where she began to grow her list of authors, energised by the live scene she plugged into when booking festival line ups for the literary tents. After the success of her first few deals – Viv Albertine’s seminal memoir Clothes Music Boys, and Kae Tempest’s Hold Your Own – she joined Fox Mason in 2013, where she could foster a versatile approach to representation that felt the most rewarding. Johnson & Alcock acquired Fox Mason in 2015 and she has spent the last six years building a definitive and diverse list of talent. She focuses on literary and reading group fiction, memoir, pop culture, narrative non-fiction and essays, but always genre and format-defying. She is especially interested in finding under-represented voices, be that because of class, region, ethnic group or gender, and uncovering stories both familiar and relatable, but that show her something new about the world.
She was named Literary Agent of the Year at the 2022 British Book Awards.
Saliann St-Clair
Saliann is a published poet who obtained a First Class award in the BA Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a London-born, London-bred, calm, functioning anaemic who writes, sings, travels (*BC), camps indoors and eats cake. She loves Prince and tennis and is working on her first novel (that’s her side of the story and she’s sticking to it) and a new collection of poems. As the part-time Ops Manager for Lewinsohn Literary, Saliann looks after the nuts and bolts of the agency.
*Before-COVID