Chantal Noel

Group Rights Director

I’m responsible for the Group Rights business across our adult and children’s publishing and I feel incredibly lucky to be in such a stimulating and rewarding part of the business.  Our work is to find the best possible publishers and licensees for the authors we represent in a variety of different formats or languages and the joy and satisfaction that I feel when a rights deal changes an author’s fortunes is as powerful now as it ever was when I started in a small indie publisher at the start of my career.

Publishing is so absorbing and I love that our work connects with almost every team in the process and that it gives us an opportunity to compare passions and perspectives on books with people from all over the world -to take our authors, quite literally, to shores far and wide.  It has always amazed me how the shared love of a story or an account of the world we live in can bring people together – contacts can become friends surprisingly quickly.

A book that's left a deep impression on me: Plainsong by Kent Haruf. I’m often drawn to epic American landscapes and this novel is so special. Set in Colorado, it’s a tender and heartbreaking story about human connection, told in powerful, spare prose.  I read it many years ago but I still think about it really quite a bit.

My literary hero:  in terms of a single character, I was always mesmerised by Pippi Longstocking although I only truly understood the appeal later on, as an adult.  She’s the ultimate free spirit: brave ,optimistic and living life on her own terms. She’s wildly different but authentically herself. I love her.

A book I'd recommend to everyone: For the sheer comic genius and ‘re-readability’, Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe.