About
Calligraph is a full-service literary agency with offices in New York and Boston. We offer representation for new and established authors, and we sell rights for our clients worldwide in print, audio, electronic, film and television.
We handle literary and commercial fiction and a wide range of non-fiction, including biography, history, memoir and narrative, popular science, popular culture, and business, children’s books and YA. Our authors include creative writers, experts in their fields, established journalists, and academics. We are selective in who we represent, with an emphasis on the quality of the writing.
We work alongside clients through every step of the publishing process, from the seed of an idea and the first contract negotiation, to watching over marketing and promotion, and to keeping the book in print many years later.
Awards for which our authors have been winners and finalists include the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize for Economics, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Bancroft, Baillie-Gifford, Cundill, Orwell, and Wainwright Prizes, the Story Award, and the PEN and Whiting Awards. Among the agency’s clients are recipients of Cullman Center, Guggenheim, MacArthur Genius, Radcliffe, and Freedom fellowships and grants. Our roster includes #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling authors, and writers whose names appear regularly on the annual ‘best books of the year’ lists in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, New Yorker, Financial Times, Economist, Guardian, Sunday Times, and many other publications.
We want our writers’ work to reach the widest possible audience, and we handle excerpts, magazine writing, speaking engagements, and the sale of other subsidiary rights. The agency works with carefully chosen co-agents to sell dramatic rights and to represent translation rights in foreign territories. We also have close relationships with leading agencies in the UK and represent a number of British writers in the US and Canada.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Our Story
Calligraph is proud to build on the legacies of the two agencies from which it stems; the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency, established in 2008, and the Kneerim & Williams Agency, founded by Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim in 1990. The two companies came together as Calligraph in 2023, and a team of agents now work across two cities, and globally.
The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency represented a broad range of well-respected authors from many different fields on both sides of the Atlantic, and now, from Calligraph, Zoë continues to work for her roster of clients. Her list includes many award-winning and best-selling authors. By building strong relationships with authors and publishers in the US, the UK, and internationally, Pagnamenta and her colleagues over the years established a reputation for working with passion, taste, determination, and integrity to look after books that matter, and inspire. Zoë brings to Calligraph a commitment to the conscientious, steadfast representation of her clients.
The Boston-based agency of Kneerim & Williams cultivated a client list that included best-selling novelists and prize-winning historians, scientists, poets, and journalists. At the heart of the agency were its dynamic founders, Ike and Jill, who prized the power of books to communicate ideas that change the world and tell the human story in all its variations. Over the course of their illustrious careers, Ike and Jill enriched the lives of many clients and colleagues with their incisive publishing expertise and bohemian spirit.
Generous with their time and supportive of younger agents, many in the industry and at Calligraph today regard them as mentors. Katherine Flynn became a partner alongside Ike and Jill in 2016. Ike Williams continues to be a valuable colleague. Please see the wonderful obituary for Jill Kneerim in the Boston Globe here. Calligraph proudly upholds her legacy by advocating for writers and thinkers whose stories and ideas move the world forward.
For more information on our history, including our name, please see this press release.
