NEWS
- Samar Yazbek’s Where The Wind Calls Home is a finalist for the National Book Award 2024. Yazbek is an International Writer at the Royal Society of Literature, which she was invited to join together with Anne Carson, Maryse Condé, Yoko Ogawa and Juan Gabriel Vasquez and others in 2022.
- Katerina Gordeeva‘s powerful book Take My Grief Away on the war in Ukraine wins the prestigious Geschwister-Scholl Preis 2024. Previous prize winners include David van Reybrouck, Andrej Kurkow, Joe Sacco, Dina Nayeri, Ahmet Altan, Götz Aly, Achille Mbembe, Glenn Greenwald, Otto Dov Kulka, Liao Yiwu, Joachim Gauck, Roberto Saviano, David Grossman and Anna Politkovskaja.
- From the Netherlands: journalist and writer Mathijs Deen wins prestigious thriller prize De Gouden Strop (The Golden Noose) 2024 for The Diver, the second book in his bestselling “Wadden” trilogy, focusing on Dutch-German Liewe Cupido and set in the transnational world of North Sea islanders and fishing communities.
- The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse for “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.
ABOUT US
Maydo Kooy Literary Agency is a young agency with a rich past. We are based in the Netherlands and represent authors as well as independent publishers and agents for the sale of rights, mostly into the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. For a list of our clients, go to our contact page.
Maydo van Marwijk Kooy first started her agency in 1980 after having worked as a foreign rights manager at Simon & Schuster, New York. The quickly expanding agency was transferred to Caroline van Gelderen in 1990 (Kooy & Van Gelderen later becoming Sebes & Van Gelderen). Since then, Maydo Kooy has worked as a translator (Swedish), teacher and adviser; from 2001 to 2006 she served on the Advisory Board of the Dutch Foundation for Literature. When taking over Jan Michael’s agency in 2017, Maydo Kooy returned to agenting.
Hanna Jansen was introduced to agenting when she worked as an assistant to Jan Michael and later to Caroline van Gelderen. Besides being an agent, she is a historian specialised in the intellectual history of the former Soviet Union. She loves how her work at the agency challenges her to read across borders and genres as well as timeframes.