Audrey Heath and Alice May Spinks, secretaries at the literary agency Curtis Brown & Massie, find themselves in the unusual position of running the agency while their employers are absent on war business. Once Albert ‘Curtis’ Brown and Hughes Massie return to their agency, Audrey and Alice are expected to step back from running the company to support their directors instead. But both women have learned an enormous amount about running a literary agency: negotiating contracts, dealing with writers and taking work out to market. Having become so engaged with the process, they are reluctant to return to their more prosaic duties.


A. M. Heath is the oldest independent literary agency in the UK. Founded in 1919 by Audrey Heath and Alice May Spinks, two women who challenged the conventions of publishing, throughout its history it has represented great writers including Anita Brookner, A.J. Cronin, Katie Fforde, Winston Graham, Radclyffe Hall, Joseph Heller, Patrick Hamilton, Conn Iggulden, Shirley Jackson, Judith Kerr, Hilary Mantel, George R.R. Martin, Flann O’Brien, Maggie O’Farrell, George Orwell and Noel Streatfeild. Based in Holborn, the agency today comprises ten agents working across fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA.
Rather than settle back into subservient roles assisting the returning menfolk, Audrey Heath and Alice May Spinks make a bold gambit; they will strike out on their own, founding a new literary agency where they could originate and represent a fresh stable of writers. Taking an office on Golden Square in London’s Soho and christening the company after their own names – the ‘A.M.’ came from Alice May, with Audrey donating her surname ‘Heath’ – they begin business. A.M. Heath, incorporated as A.M. Heath Ltd in 1921, is born.
Henry Williamson's novel Tarka the Otter is an early success for the agency and today considered a classic of rural literature.
Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness is published. Represented by Audrey Heath, Hall had been living with her lover, Una Troubridge, since 1917, and her novel sparked public conversation about lesbian relationships. In an age when women had only just been enfranchised, and in which homosexuality would remain a criminal offence for a further four decades, The Well of Loneliness was bound to cause a sensation – and so it did, quickly attracting the ire of the Sunday Express, who began a campaign dedicated to suppressing it. The novel soon became the centrepiece of a famous trial under the Obscene Publications Act. Jonathan Cape was found guilty of obscenity, and all copies of the book were ordered to be destroyed. Though it survived a similar trial in the United States, where the book would go on to sell upwards of 100,000 copies alone, The Well of Loneliness would not be officially available in the United Kingdom until 1949, when social mores had moved on.
In 1930, a chance meeting between Audrey Heath and Cyrus Brooks of European Books, which sought to bring European works in translation to English markets, led to the two firms sharing offices. The passionately cosmopolitan Cyrus and his European experience opened up another door for A.M. Heath. At the time, English and American publishers had not yet begun to fully exploit the translation rights to the books they published, and agents had not taken the potential of foreign rights seriously. Cyrus’s translation work had already opened his eyes to the opportunities of European markets, and he soon began representing the agency’s entire list in translation – in effect becoming the United Kingdom’s first foreign rights agent. In 1931, Cyrus became a member of A.M. Heath in a full-time capacity and was soon appointed the agency’s third director.
The new decade saw the first sustained period of growth for the agency, much of it fuelled by the agency’s ‘serial department’. At this moment in history, the sale of short stories to the ‘women’s weeklies’, could form a considerable portion of an author’s income, and A.M. Heath worked tirelessly to support its authors in this regard. The weeklies were a breeding ground for future talent as well, and it was here that Archibald Joseph ‘A.J.’ Cronin first published his Dr. Finlay stories, which would go on to tremendous success, both in print and on screen. Cronin was so successful as a novelist and short story writer that, during the problematic post-war years to come, the commission on his royalties was the difference between A.M. Heath’s continued existence and it becoming another victim of the war.
Winston Graham, who in the post-War era would find elevated fame with his Poldark novels, first began publishing crime and thrillers with The House with the Stained Glass Windows. Patrick Hamilton’s novels of restless young men in London – including the ‘trilogy’ Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky are widely praised and will go on to be regarded as classics of the inter-war period.
Noel Streatfeild's classic novel Ballet Shoes – the story of three foundling sisters set against the world of dance and stage – was first published, adapted twice for the BBC, and has been in print ever since. In the same year, Barbara Euphan Todd's mischievous scarecrow Worzel Gummidge made his first appearance – and, in 1939, a paperback edition of the book would become the very first publication by the now-celebrated children’s publisher Puffin. Across the next twenty-five years, Worzel Gummidge would appear in ten books, going on to be adapted for both radio and television in series that defined the childhoods of successive generations.
The Irish literary novelist Flann O’Brien begins his career in with At Swim Two Birds (though his most enduring novel, The Third Policeman, would not find a publisher until the year after his death, in 1967). And perhaps the greatest commercial success of the inter-war years for the agency was Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel, Rogue Male. The story of an unnamed British sportsman who sets out to assassinate a European dictator – and, having been caught in the attempt, must evade authorities abroad and at home – was an instant hit, adapted into the 1941 Hollywood movie Man Hunt and remade since. It has remained in print to this day.
If the years of the First World War had seen Audrey Heath and Alice ‘May’ Spinks growing in confidence enough to launch their own agency, the Second World War was the blow that almost killed it. A.M. Heath had built both its reputation and its financial security on regular, reliable incomes from overseas – but, with the advent of war, all of that came to an end. The Regent Street office was twice bombed during German air-raids on London.
Three months after the death of the celebrated British writer George Orwell, A.M. Heath was appointed by the Orwell Estate to represent the deceased author’s rights going forward. At the time, Cyrus had valued the estate – for tax purposes – at the princely sum of £3,000, the equivalent of just under £100,000 in 2019. It was a healthy, if not earth-shattering, figure for an author who was best known, in his lifetime, for his journalism, and whose novels had sometimes been critically acclaimed, sometimes turned down by his option publishers – with T.S. Eliot famously declining to publish Animal Farm for Faber & Faber in 1944 – and had sometimes been tortuous to write. The novel that would come to define him, 1984, was written during a period of sustained ill-health and was first published in 1949, shortly before he died. In the following decades the agency would come to ensure that Orwell’s writing found an audience with successive generations of readers, and that his legacy grew and grew, especially through a close association with the Orwell Foundation, and the establishment of the Orwell Prizes.
Joan Aiken – who came to A.M. Heath via her relationship with the Brandt Agency, and would go on to be awarded the MBE for services to children’s literature in 1999 – published her first collection. Joan, who came from a family of writers, had always won over readers, but it was her 1962 novel, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and the series it spawned – taking in thirteen titles over four decades – that captured a permanent piece of the nation’s imagination. Joan would go on to become one of the agency’s longest-lasting clients, until, still writing, she passed away in 2004.
One of the most extraordinary stories in A.M. Heath’s history began when Lobsang Rampa, an exiled Tibetan Lama draped in saffron robes, appeared on the doorstep of our Dover Street office with a copy of his memoir, The Third Eye, his chronicle of growing up in Tibet. Rampa claimed to have undergone a procedure in which a small hole – the eponymous ‘third eye’ – was drilled into his forehead to propagate powers of clairvoyance. Intrigued by a client as extraordinary as this, Cyrus secured a deal with Secker & Warburg, who published the book in 1956. It was an international sensation. Yet not everyone in the scholarly community was convinced of the veracity of Rampa’s account. By 1958, after an investigation by an eminent Tibetologist and his private detective, the Daily Mail had exposed Rampa’s lie: rather than an exiled Tibetan Lama, his real name was in fact Cyril Hoskin and he had been born, the son of a plumber, in Plympton, Devon.
The agency’s founder Audrey Heath sadly passed away. The agency had already been joined by Mark Hamilton, Cyrus’s son-in-law, in 1956, and after Cyrus retired in 1960, he became the firm’s first sole managing director. He ushered in a new generation of fêted US authors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, who became clients via arrangements with US agencies. So too did Eudora Welty, Anne Tyler, Jack Kerouac, Patricia Highsmith and Norman Mailer. Through a relationship with Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, A.M. Heath for a period represented some of the finest Italian writers, including literary stars Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and Leonardo Sciascia.
The agency was proud to represent the UK rights for a debut novel by the American author Joseph Heller. Catch-22 had been sold on the basis of a partial manuscript to Secker & Warburg – but, on receiving the completed novel, long after the agreed delivery date, they had declined to publish it, A.M. Heath was instead able to auction the rights, eventually contracting the novel with Jonathan Cape – to immediate, and long-lasting, success.
Judith Kerr’s picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, was published in and has delighted generations of children since, never falling out of print. 1968 also saw the publication of Elizabeth Beresford’s first Wombles book – a series that would become beloved in both books and television.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was awarded the Booker Prize for her eleventh book, Heat and Dust. A client of the agency since the late 1950s, Ruth’s earlier novel, The Householder, had been adapted for the screen in 1963 by Merchant Ivory, with whom she went on to enjoy a lasting collaboration. Winning the Booker Prize was a matter of enormous pride for A.M. Heath, who had for so long championed literary writing, and the success was compounded the following year when David Storey was awarded the prize for his semi-autobiographical novel, Saville.
Anita Brookner, the daughter of Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazi regime, had become the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University, but did not write her first novel, A Start in Life – published by Jonathan Cape in 1981 – until she was 53 years old. Though she followed it swiftly with two further novels, it was her fourth, Hotel du Lac – the story of a romance novelist who takes herself into self-imposed exile at a hotel on Lake Geneva – that won the attention of the Booker judges. In 1984, Hotel du Lac triumphed above future classics such as JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, to take home the prize.
A.M. Heath signed the famous double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who first joined Soviet Russia’s KGB in 1963 and, ten years later, began working secretly for MI6. Gordievsky’s double life was close to being uncovered, but MI6 were able to spirit him safely to London; and it was at this point that he engaged A.M. Heath to help tell his story. Gordievsky’s information about Soviet plans and about the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev gave Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan the confidence to negotiate the end of the Cold War.
Graham Hancock was already writing for The Economist about international aid when he changed approach with his work, The Sign and the Seal, which chronicled a search for the lost Ark of the Covenant, and his 1995 work, Fingerprints of the Gods – which, taking a step further, contended that a lost prehistorical civilisation was the progenitor of all classical civilisations in the historical record. Hancock may have been treated with scepticism by some critics, but readers did not agree: Fingerprints of the Gods alone would go on to be translated into 27 languages and sell over five million copies around the world.
Northern Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell's first novel After You’d Gone won the Betty Trask Award in 2000. Her fifth, The Hand that First Held Mine, would win the Costa Novel Award in 2010, and her eighth, Hamnet, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2020.
After 17 years at our home on St Martin’s Lane, A.M. Heath looked to the future and committed to buying our first property. After three generations of moving from cramped, ramshackle offices to yet more cramped, ramshackle offices – always overflowing with books – Warwick Court in Holborn would become the agency’s permanent home. Five storeys of pristine offices in the heart of London’s legal district (and only a stone’s throw from one of the properties that Thomas Cromwell, about to be thrust back into the public spotlight by the works of Hilary Mantel, had made his own 450 years before), it was A.M. Heath’s welcome to the 21st century.
When a young historical novelist, Conn Iggulden, was plucked out of the submissions pile, a new career was about to be made. After a succession of bestselling historical novels, chronicling classical Rome, the story of Genghis Khan, medieval Britain and much more besides, Conn became the only writer ever to hold the No. 1 position in both the Sunday Times’ hardback fiction and non-fiction lists, when The Dangerous Book for Boys became a surprise hit.
The Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew – who had co-written books with Oleg Gordievsky and had also written two volumes in conjunction with the exiled Soviet archivist Vasili Mitrokhin – was given virtually unrestricted access to MI5’s archives so that he could pen its first ever authorised history, The Defence of the Realm, published on the service’s own centenary. The agency has gone on to represent authorised histories of MI6 and GCHQ.
Two of the agencies’ greatest successes had been a long time in the making. Twenty-five years after first joining A.M. Heath, Hilary Mantel became its fourth Booker prize winner, when Wolf Hall – her seminal novel chronicling the life of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII – took the prize. In 2012, its follow-up volume, Bring Up the Bodies, repeated the feat, making Hilary the first writer in history to win two Booker Prizes with successive novels – and the first to win with a direct sequel. A succession of brilliantly observed novels and a career full of critical acclaim was being crowned by a runaway commercial success. It is emblematic of the belief at the heart of everything A.M. Heath stands for: great writers and great writing.
The American television network HBO began broadcasting their adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice And Fire series, now styled ‘Game of Thrones’ after its first volume. The UK rights, sold to HarperCollins by Sara Fisher on behalf of the American agent Ralph Vicinanza in the mid-1990s, had been steadily growing, after a couple of early false starts, but the year 2011-12 was a revelation, with the television series driving astronomical and unexpected sales. A deal done sixteen years previously was taking flight.
The critically-acclaimed British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie, whose A God in Every Stone and Burnt Shadows were both shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, became a winner with her novel Home Fire, as well as being longlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year.
In 2019 the agency celebrated its centenary by helping to launch the Orwell Prize for Fiction, the latest development in its long-term partnership with the Orwell Foundation. The inaugural winner was Anna Burns, with her novel Milkman.
With the addition of Anna Webber, the agency grew to the largest and broadest team of agents in its history, and won the Booker Prize for the sixth time in its history, as Anna’s client Samantha Harvey picked up the gong for her fifth novel, Orbital.