Selwa Anthony is ensconced on an avocado-green leather sofa, a chihuahua reclining on either side of her. The leading literary agent is small but commanding, a diminutive grande dame with sharp brown eyes and long purple fingernails. As always, she is carefully coiffured and glamorously dressed, as if her next appointment were a cocktail party. But Anthony's mood on this warm afternoon is more defiant than festive.
Kate Morton, now in her early 40s, was studying English literature at the University of Queensland when she made her first attempt at writing a novel almost 20 years ago. Anthony, who was given the manuscript, tells me she decided against passing it on to publishers: "The first one wasn't worth showing anyone." Morton's second manuscript was better, but the agent's attempt to find a publisher for it failed. Anthony respected Morton's determination to persevere.
For Anthony, watching Morton's sales figures shoot skyward felt like the exhilarating culmination of her career. "She said Kate was the writer she'd been waiting for all her life," says one of her close friends, non-fiction author Sue Williams. "To have everything go so horribly wrong has been a huge blow for her."A couple of years ago, Anthony tripped over a barrier that kept the chihuahuas out of her bedroom.
I'll jump up and down if a cover isn't right, because you do judge a book by its cover. And its title. Selwa's not really in it for the money. She's in it for Australian writing. She's incredibly patriotic, much more than most people I know. Her first marriage was unhappy, and she eventually walked out with her two children, Anthea, then seven, and Linda, three. To support them, she got a job with the Grahame Book Company, rising to be retail and merchandising manager of the Sydney chain's five stores. She adored bookselling. "Every day something new happened," she says.
Fellow agent Lyn Tranter believes in maintaining a professional distance between herself and her clients. "I don't go to their houses and they don't come to mine," says Tranter, who would rather talk to writers about their work than their personal neuroses: "I am not a cheap psychiatrist." Anthony, by contrast, often has an author staying in her spare room and is always available for a heart-to-heart on the phone.
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