Sam Edenborough
Sam handles translation rights on behalf of Greyhound Literary's clients and is building his own list of authors.
He began his career at A.M. Heath, then moved to Andrew Nurnberg Associates where he started selling translation rights. From 2001 until 2021 he worked at ILA, a specialist translation rights agency, where he sold rights for a wide range of English-language authors, including many prize winners and global bestsellers. In January 2022 Sam joined Greyhound Literary as a director, to represent translation rights for the agency's clients throughout the world.
He served as President of the Association of Authors’ Agents from 2014 to 2016.
Sam was a founding member of the international publishing band Half on Signature, playing tenor and alto sax with them until their last gig in 2017. He currently plays tenor in the publishing jazz combo The Editörial Standards.
Sam is a life-long reader of speculative fiction. He loves hard SF and cyberpunk that explores the biggest questions about what it means to be human (Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, Greg Bear, Adrian Tchaikovsky); fantasy with wit, brilliantly deep world-building and characters with an edge (Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, Richard Swan) and work that has pushed SFF genre boundaries (Becky Chambers’ Long Way to A Small Angry Planet, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries). He is interested in upmarket, folkloric or horror-tinged fiction (Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, Max Porter’s Lanny).
He is also looking for fiction and non-fiction which engages with landscape or the sea in a profound and original way (e.g. Robert MacFarlane’s Mountains of the Mind; Ian McGuire’s The North Water; Derek Lundy’s The Godforsaken Sea; Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys; Kapka Kassabova’s Border); books about jazz and classical music and musicians (favourites include Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane, Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise); work by historians and novelists who challenge us to rethink comfortable assumptions about an era or a culture (e.g. Anna Keay’s Restless Republic, Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing); and writing by scientists who are able to communicate complex ideas to a wide readership with verve (e.g. Alice Roberts' Tamed, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, Cat Bohannon’s Eve). He welcomes submissions of work intended for adult readers in the areas suggested above, and is keen to work with writers whose background, identity, sexuality, cultural experience or ethnicity have historically been under-represented on publishers’ lists in the UK.
