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Ask the Agent — Laura Macdougall
Simon Whaley chats to Laura Macdougall of United Agents about improving LGBTQ+ representation in publishing and what publishers are looking for.
This piece first appeared in the print issue of Writing Magazine, in December 2024
Laura Macdougall began her publishing career with Hodder & Stoughton, working with authors such as David Nicholls and Stephen King, before changing roles and becoming a literary agent. She joined Tibor Jones and Associates before moving to United Artists in 2017.
Laura is a former judge of the Green Carnation Prize, launched to celebrate fiction written by LGBT writers, and in 2019 she won the Romantic Novelist’s Association’s inaugural Inclusion Award for her work supporting diversity and inclusion in publishing. In 2017, she was one of The Bookseller‘s Rising Stars and later shortlisted for their Agent of the Year award in 2022.
Authors she represents include Jim Broadbent, Celia J Anderson, Harper Ford, Jess Phillips, Sophie Ward, West Streeting, and Amanda Thomson.
