The Pontas Agency attended the Frankfurt Book Fair for the 28th time in a row! We've not missed a “Frankfurt” since 1992! Anna Soler-Pont, Maria Cardona and Nick Owen had many meetings between Tuesday, October 15th and Friday, October 18th in the new Literary Agent’s Center at Festhalle, a venue which is one hundred years old, very well kept, and one which we all loved.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the best place to catch up on books about to be published, translated, adapted, or even to be written, with publishers, editors, scouts and film producers from all over the world. With most of them, we communicate during the year over phone and email, with some we get to meet them face to face for the first time and everything changes.
We had the chance to catch up with Gabriella Fort-Page, the US publisher at Amazon Crossing who has acquired the World English rights of Dolores Redondo's novel La cara norte del corazón (The North Face of the Heart), currently being translated (in the photo above left, she is with Maria holding a copy of the Publishing Perspectives printed magazine with a full page dedicated to Dolores’ International success). And we always enjoy our meetings with our Taiwan-based co-agent Gray Tan and his team (in the right photo, with Nick).
Maria (above left) with editors from Klett-Cotta and Tropen Verlag; and Anna (above right) with Patrice Hoffmann, the director at Flammarion.
Ulrike Stenglin is the editor at Hanserblau who has acquired the German translation rights of JJ Bola’s Mask Off: Masculinity Redifined, just published in English by Pluto Press; and Anna discussed with Gallimard's editor Gustavo Guerrero the work-in-progress novel by Milena Busquets, so far the only author we have managed to place in his list in more than twenty years of a professional relationship.
Even before Girl in White Cotton / Burnt Sugar, the debut novel by Avni Doshi, was published in India by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, Hermione Thompson acquired the remaining World English rights and will publish it in July 2020 at Hamish Hamilton UK under the title of Burnt Sugar. One of the evenings, Cristina Sánchez-Andrade had an interesting conversation at the Instituto Cervantes in Frankfurt with her German translator Anja Ruediger.