Foreign Rights: Working as an Agent or Scout in a Foreign Country

Moderatoed by Daniela Schlingmann - Director, Daniela Schlingmann Literary Scouting, UK

Daniela started her publishing career at an independent publisher in Frankfurt, Germany, and moved on to join Random House in Munich, commissioning German fiction as well as writers from the UK, the US and specialising in the Nordic countries. In 2005, Daniela relocated to London and founded DSLS Ltd. The agency is scouting for more than 50 international publishers and imprints, and several film and TV producers. In 2020, DSLS extended its scouting services to the US market.

Photo by Tim Smith-laing.

Stephanie Barrouillet - Founder, S.B. Rights Agency, Israel

Stephanie Barrouillet is a foreign rights agent with over twenty years experience in selling rights for children’s and comics books. After an M.A. in Children’s Literature, she worked for Walker Books Ltd in London. In 2011 she joined Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir Publishing to promote Hebrew children’s books internationally and in 2014 she decided to found her own agency, S.B.Rights Agency. S.B.Rights Agency currently represents children’s book and comics/graphic novel publishers from Poland, Estonia, South Africa, Korea, Turkey, Israel, Germany, Sweden, Bulgaria, Spain and Brazil.

Amy Spangler - Founder, AnatoliaLit, Turkey

A native of Circleville, Ohio, USA, Spangler moved to Istanbul in 1999, where she worked for a small publisher for four years before co-founding AnatoliaLit Agency in 2005. Spangler is also a translator, primarily from Turkish into English, and has been a university lecturer in translation studies. Her most recently published book translations are Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş (SJP for Hogarth, 2019), and A Strange Woman by LeylâErbil (Deep Vellum, 2022).

Stephanie Cabot - Literary Agent, Susanna Lea Associates, France

Stephanie Cabot is half French, half American and grew up in London, Paris and New England. She attended Harvard, where she studied History, and first worked in New York and London with JP Morgan. Her career as an agent began at WME in London before relocating to the US and to The Gernert Company in NYC. Stephanie joined SLA in the Spring of 2020. Stephanie has spent the past ten years involved with a small internationally focused social justice NGO, World Connect, whose mission is to empower grassroots leaders to initiate change in their communities.

Li Kangqin, Founder , New River Literary, UK

Li Kangqin is the founder of New River Literary, a London-based literary agency representing books and authors from East Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature from University of Leicester. Before that she worked as acquisition editor and rights manager at Shanghai 99 Readers’ Culture. She was also a reader of, and advisor on, Sinophone books for MacLehose Press and Granta Books. Prior to working in publishing, Li was a lecturer in English and translation studies at Shanghai International Studies University, and translated Anaïs Nin, John Updike, and Richard Ford from English to Chinese.

Photo by Philip Brereton