Please note that in order to focus on the development of her authors’ projects, Isobel is currently pausing consideration of new work: she is not receiving submissions at the moment. There will be notice on this page when her submissions are open again.

Our other agents’ lists remain wide open now — please do consider sending your work to Juliet Pickering, Kate Burke and Sian Ellis-Martin, as appropriate. You can find more information about submitting your work in our guidelines here.

Isobel Dixon is MD and Head of Books at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, where she represents writers from around the world, among them Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers and international prize winners. Her interests are wide-ranging and her clients' work includes contemporary, historical and literary fiction, crime and thrillers, memoir, biography and narrative history. Authors on her list have, among others, won the Costa Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Caine Prize, Commonwealth and PEN Awards, the Barry Award, the OCM Bocas Prize and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, the Author's Club First Book Award, the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize). Writers on her list have also won all the major South African literary awards.

Isobel was born and educated in South Africa, and in Edinburgh where she completed Master's degrees in English Literature and Applied Linguistics. Her debut poetry collection Weather Eye (Carapace, 2001) won the Sanlam and the Olive Schreiner Prizes in South Africa. Her further collections, A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator, originally published by Salt, were both republished by Nine Arches in 2018. Bearings was published by Modjaji in South Africa and Nine Arches in the UK (April 2016) and Mariscat published a pamphlet The Leonids (August 2016). Nine Arches published her latest collection, A Whistling of Birds (with 12 illustrations by Douglast Robertson), in 2023. Nine Arches will publish her next collection, The Landing, in 2026.

She is President of BTBS The Book Trade Charity and was a Trustee of the National Centre for Writing in Norwich and on the Board of Poetry London. She was President of the Association of Authors' Agents in 2020 and 2021. She is a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow and often gives workshops on creative writing, agenting and negotiation, and speaks on panels at literary events, to university students, schools and to writers' groups.

Some links of possible interest:
The Future Bookshelf — 'On the Question of Voice' — and what it means for writers BFLA Open Week — A Writing Life: The Long Road & The Long View Historical Novel Society interview with Isobel Dixon
The Guardian — How Do We Stop Publishing From Being So Posh and White?

Clients with recent work include: Estate of Tatamkhulu Afrika, Estate of Gilbert Adair, Sally Andrew, Romalyn Ante, Abdul Rahman Azzam, Sandy Balfour, Tom Benn, Karin Brynard, Graeme Macrae Burnet, James Cahill, Edward Carey, Elizabeth Chadwick, Anne de Courcy, Achmat Dangor, Finuala Dowling, Barbara Erskine, Felice Fallon, Tracey Farren, Kathryn Faulke, David Gilman, Lyndall Gordon, Ann Granger, Cormac James, Peter James, Tomasz Jedrowski, Charles Lambert, Estate of Hugh Lewin, Estate of Edward Beauclerk Maurice, Zakes Mda, Deon Meyer, Christopher Nicholson, Lawrence Norfolk, Gregory Norminton, Joseph O'Connor, Sheila O'Flanagan, Kaite O'Reilly, Alan Parks, Monique Roffey, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Julian Stockwin, Etienne van Heerden, Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavic, Bridget Walsh, Anne Watts, Harry Whitehead, Edward Wilson-Lee.