Lucy Cleland

Lucy Cleland is a literary agent representing idea-driven and narrative nonfiction of all stripes, upmarket fiction, and select children’s projects. Her list is bold and eclectic, united by an overarching interest in how culture shapes us (and how we shape it). Her clients have been Pulitzer finalists, winners of the NBCC Award and PEN America Awards, recipients of MacArthur “Genius” grants, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; their books have been featured in the New Yorker’s Briefly Noted, New York Time’s Editors’ Choice, and best books of the year lists, as well as ranked as USA Today Bestsellers and selected for Book of the Month Club. In nonfiction, she gravitates towards cultural criticism, social science, and psychology that offers powerful clarity, history that informs how we see the world today, literary nonfiction that plunges readers into a unique subject or experience, essays with an intellectual core, and ‘big idea’ books that carve out new territory in contemporary conversations, particularly around feminism, law, race, philosophy, and technology. In fiction, she’s drawn to novels anchored by craft and animated by potent commercial concepts (speculative and magical realism welcome!), as well as historical fiction that immerses readers in non-Western settings. A southern transplant to Boston from Atlanta, Lucy graduated from Wellesley College and cut her teeth as an agent working closely with Jill Kneerim at Kneerim & Williams. She lives with her wife and a lot of books in Jamaica Plain.