JK Rowling’s agent launches a new chapter for muted writers

There are plenty of people in publishing who will privately admit that the industry has become increasingly nervous about what it publishes and who it is prepared to upset. Literary agent Neil Blair has spent several years watching that nervousness at close quarters and has now decided to do something about it. 

Blair, best known as J.K. Rowling’s literary agent, was speaking at the official launch of High Line, the new independent publishing company he has founded to give a platform to original voices and ideas he believes are increasingly being overlooked by the mainstream.

“I felt for quite a while there was something not quite right in the publishing space,” he told the room. “I saw great authors or new authors and new voices struggling to get published, not because of the quality of their writing or a lack of original thinking, but because their perspectives didn’t conform with the increasingly narrowing views in mainstream publishing.”

For Blair, the warning signs had been there for some time, as of the most striking involved was his most famous client. When Rowling spoke publicly on gender issues over six years ago, she was preparing to publish a children’s book with Little, Brown.

“A good number of the predominantly young employees wrote a letter to the CEOs, demanding not only that Little, Brown didn’t publish the book, but they sacked her as a client,” Blair said. The company refused, but he regarded the episode as “chilling and significant”.

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