Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2000, I was awarded some money by the UK National Lottery and the Arts Council of England to put together a collection of short stories. I worked with a literary agent called Deborah Rogers, whose fame as a literary agent was only exceeded by her generosity as a lover of new writing and a supporter of new writers. She would sit in her manuscript piled office in London’s Powis Mews and talk about your work in a way that suggested that it mattered to her as much as it did to you – even though at the time I was a barely published writer, and she was a highly successful literary agent. She already represented future Nobel Prize Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. She represented Ian McEwan and Peter Carey and Hanif Kureishi. She had once represented Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. And none of that is name dropping, because those names are merely a few from a bigger list of considerable writers that found their way to Deborah Rogers’ door at Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency.' (Graeme Harper, Editorial introduction)