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Molly Ker Hawn

Molly Ker Hawn represents authors who write for the young adult and middle grade market.

Her time in the children’s publishing industry has included editorial roles at Chronicle Books and Dial Books for Young Readers, early social media development for a major teen magazine, and serving as National Programs Director at the Children’s Book Council, the trade association of American children’s book publishers. She’s also been a bookseller, and a past board member of the United States Board on Books for Young People.

She lives in London and works with authors and publishers both in the U.K. and the U.S. She’s bounced back and forth from America to England since she was a teenager: She grew up in Northern California, lived for a time in the West Country, read English at Cambridge University, spent many years in New York City, and now lives a stone’s throw from the River Thames.

She’s looking for middle grade and young adult fiction that’s inventive, well-crafted, and rich with emotion. She is also interested in non-fiction for readers ages 8-18. “I like wit, but not snark; I prefer books that lean more toward literary than commercial, but of course, my perfect book neatly bridges the two. The books on my list all share a strong sense of authentic place, whether real or imaginary. Some of my favorite (non-client) authors are Ellen Raskin, Edward Ormondroyd, Margo Lanagan, Maureen Johnson, Jack Gantos, Jacqueline Woodson, Catherynne Valente, Chris Crutcher, Francesca Lia Block, Noel Streatfeild, Gene Luen Yang, and Susan Cooper. And in the non-children’s/YA pantheon, my favorites include Maeve Binchy, AS Byatt, Mollie Panter-Downes, Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Laurie Colwin, and Judith Krantz.”

If you’ve got a terrific story, well-told, Molly wants to read it.

Send me your smart, funny YA contemp romance, your clever literary MG, your upmarket YA horror.

Twitter: @mollykh

email: [email protected]

Submission Guidelines:

Please do not send an exclusive query. Queries are meant to be shared with multiple agencies. The Bent Agency ONLY accepts email queries. If you send your query by postal mail, it will be recycled and not returned to you.

It is their goal to respond to every query. If you don’t receive a response within a month, please resend your query and indicate that you’re sending it again.

If the agent is interested in your work, she will respond with instructions for sending the rest of your material. If we do request material from you, we ask that you check back with us before accepting representation elsewhere.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

Welcome to guest blogger Molly Ker Hawn of the Bent Agency based in New York. Molly, who lives in London and works with authors in the UK and America, is on the look out for YA and middle grade fiction. The agency asks to see the first ten pages of manuscripts so I asked Molly for the ten most common mistakes she finds in those ten pages - so you can avoid them.  I get about a hundred