Take part in a WriteMentor Hub-exclusive pitching contest judged by Joanna Moult, agent at Skylark Literary.
Joanna began her publishing career at Hodder Children’s Books learning from some of the best editors in the business and editing fantastic authors including Cressida Cowell, Alex Shearer and Kes Gray, as well as creating fiction for brands such as Felicity Wishes. She left to cover maternity leave, running the Children’s Editorial Department at Simon & Schuster Children’s Books. There, among other things, she edited Sophie McKenzie’s award-winning debut novel Girl, Missing and the Yuck series by the Beastly Boys.
She left Simon & Schuster to have children and spent over a year living in India and editing an ex-pat magazine. On her return to the UK, aside from nurturing her own readers-of-the-future, she became Editorial Director for Children’s Fiction at literary agents Mulcahy Conway Associates, where she worked to seek out new talent and edit submissions to publishers.
Having been inspired by this experience and bitten by the bug of discovering great new voices in children’s books, becoming a children’s literary agent and setting up Skylark with Amber was a natural next step.