Fridays are internal meeting days at the Ute Körner Literary Agency.
We meet mid-morning, over coffee, and sometimes with cookies or a little pastry that someone brings along.
It’s the “official” moment when we catch up on the week’s events: stalled contracts; payments that haven’t come through; new publications that have arrived and that we’re especially excited about; updates from our authors, illustrators, or clients—in short, the ups and downs of our daily lives as agents, shared with one another.
And there, in that relaxed atmosphere, other kinds of topics always tend to come up—things that make us laugh, think, or surprise us, often connected to a cultural event, an industry trend, or a personal discovery… And everyone has their say.
It struck us as a fertile ground for gathering ideas and expanding on them in this Substack we’re now launching.
An agent does many things, but to sum it up: we are mediators.
We work in the middle: between authors and publishers, between manuscripts and books, between languages and countries.
Hence the name of our Substack, which we’ll be nurturing collectively so that the different voices within the agency can be heard.
We are passionate about culture in all its forms, and we hope that comes across in our writing as well.
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