Maria Brannan

Maria is translation rights manager for Greyhound Literary and is also building her own list of authors as a primary agent. She previously spent over five years working as a literary scout at Maria B. Campbell Associates in London, where she advised international publishers in over 12 countries on the adult and children’s publishing market, and scouted multiple books for their film/tv client, Netflix.

She has wide-ranging tastes across commercial, upmarket and literary fiction and is looking to represent authors in the Adult, New Adult and YA spaces.  She loves character-driven and high concept novels that combine intelligent and striking writing with a commercial hook. Anything with a strong aesthetic sensibility or a speculative bent is likely to be up her street and her taste runs the gamut from the dark, strange and disturbing to the wholesome, heart-warming and cosy.

At the moment she is particularly interested in seeing:

Horror and gothic fiction

• Feminist themes, whether that’s rage and revenge or something more soft and insidious.
• Horror that taps into social and cultural issues and conversations – she’d particularly love to find a landlord/housing crisis inspired horror novel
• Dark, sharp writing with teeth and feral edge
• Lush, atmospheric gothic fiction, especially if it’s approaching the genre from a new angle or culture.
• Historical and folkloric inspired horror. Medieval settings particularly welcome!
• Horror-fantasy retellings of fairy tales like The Red Shoes or Bluebeard
• Religious horror – Catholicism is often the go-to for this subgenre but she’d also love to see other religious traditions explored.
• Anything nature related, cottagegore-esque, witchy and strange
• Relationship focused horror
• Dark academia which dives below the glamourised surface
• A new take on vampires generally or more specifically vampire romance
• Slasher with a high concept twist
• Horror crossed with other genres, whether that’s thriller, romance (aka horromance), fantasy horror, Sci-fi horror.

Some of her favourite authors are: Brom, Christopher Buehlman, Mona Awad,  Ainslie Hogarth, Tananarive Due, Lucy Rose, Stephen Graham Jones, Ling Ling Huang, Cassandra Khaw, Kylie Lee Bakera, Nat Cassidy and Isabel Cañas

Fantasy

Twists on the traditional adventure/quest narrative, whether that’s the form the quest takes itself or the characters you wouldn’t expect to be there.

• Epic fantasy with a propulsive character-driven narrative, that has personal stakes as well as larger world-shaking ones. A world that feels really lived in is a must.
• Unusual and unexpected fairy tale retellings
• Cosy fantasy – she loves a dark creepy narrative but also adores a really heart-warming one too. Give her a hallmark movie but make it fantasy – preferably with an animal companion or a character like Thimble from Legends & Lattes for good measure.
• Fantasy romance or romantasy with a difference (i.e. probably not hot fae or shadow daddies unless they’re doing something unique). She would love to see a genre mashup too e.g. sports romantasy (dragon racing anyone?) And anything that breaks with convention – stories where the female MC is more powerful than her male love interest and non-heteronormative relationships are very welcome. Farmer in Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper series and Wendell in Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series are two of her favourite love interests in fantasy, make of that what you will.

Some of her favourite authors are: James Islington, Andrew Stewart, Joe Abercrombie, T. Kingfisher, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, Heather Fawcett, Carissa Broadbent, J.D. Evans,

Speculative fiction and grounded fantasy

• Historical fiction with a speculative or fantasy twist in the vein of Babel, The Quick, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Contemporary upmarket speculative novels that explore the human consequences such as Jo Harkness’s Tell Me An Ending and The Ministry of Time
• Incisive and thoughtful character focused stories with a light speculative touch such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Lonely Castle in the Mirror
• Sweeping love stories with a magical touch in the vein of The Time Traveller’s Wife or Meet Me in Another Life

Literary fiction

• Voice-led, relationship focused contemporary fiction such as Intermezzo and Love, Marriage
• Sweeping, character-driven historical and contemporary novels such as Pachinko or James Hynes’ Sparrow, or more recently Susan Choi’s Flashlight
• Myth and folklore retellings in the vein of Pat Barker and Madeline Miller, especially those from less heavily-represented cultures.
• Weird girl fiction (some overlap with her horror tastes here) but think Eliza Clark, Natsuko Imamura, Mona Awad, Sierra Greer and Chelsea G Summers.

Romance

• She is an absolute sucker for a good rom-com or romance, especially those that make you fall for both of the leads like Georgette Heyer does in Frederica (an older favourite) and Ali Hazelwood in The Love Hypothesis (a new favourite). She’s keen to see anything that breaks the mould in terms of the characters and their backgrounds or that takes you to a setting that you wouldn’t normally expect.

Thriller

• On the darker side of her taste, she loves a great high-concept thriller in the vein of The Last House on Needless Street or The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and is always looking for a book that can give her the chills she felt reading The Whisper Man or The Next Girl.

Things that are probably not the right fit for her:

Portal fantasy, space opera, hard sci-fi, anything about our AI overlords (we’re already living it), hardboiled crime, graphic and gratuitous violence and splatterpunk.

Submissions should be emailed to maria@greyhoundliterary.co.uk

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