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Ask The Agent — Jessica Woollard
Simon Whaley chats to Jessica Woollard of David Higham Associates about the narrative non-fiction genre of nature and landscape writing.
This feature first appeared in print in the June 2025 issue of Writing Magazine
Jessica Woollard has been a literary agent for over thirty years, working at Toby Eady Associates and The Marsh Agency before moving to David Higham Associates in 2016. She was the agent for Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, and her clients include Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, and Merlin Sheldrake.
How has the role of literary agent changed during your career?
Things used to be slower. We’d submit printed manuscripts by post. My mentor, Toby Eady, famously used to deliver his submissions by hand, walking the manuscripts round New York. Editors had offices, and they were filled with piles of paper. We send a lot of material around the world quickly now and readers have a lot of reading matter pushed at them in many different ways-but it still takes the same amount of time for us all to read a book.
