Edwina de Charnacé.
Edwina joined Mulcahy Sweeney Associates (literary agency of MMB Creative) after completing an English Language and Literature degree at Oxford University and an MA in East Asian Art History at SOAS.Edwina is French-Korean and grew up in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Despite speaking several languages, English – her adoptive mother tongue – is the only one she enjoys for e-mail. She tells strangers she is French in a non-French-sounding accent and attempts to conceal her French-sounding Korean.
Edwina is fascinated by the relationship between language and group identity – are we what we say and how we sound? To try and answer such questions, she hops between genres across the commercial to literary spectrums of the fiction and non-fiction she represents.
These include Poppy Kuroki’s forthcoming samurai-Japan-set timeslip fantasy series, ANCESTOR MEMORIES (OneWorld, 2024), James Roseman’s cross-cultural, relationships-focused literary debut, PLACEHOLDERS (Verve, 2024) and Emma Simpson’s BREAKING WAVES (Icon Books, 2025), a non-expert nature memoir about womanhood and open water swimming.
Edwina also represents writing in translation, her current focus being contemporary Korean fiction. Among these are Cheon Seon-Ran’s THE SAVIOUR AT NIGHT (translated by Gene Png, Bloomsbury 2025), a sapphic vampire crime/romance crossover, Amil’s ROADKILL (translated by Archana Madhavan, Vintage 2025), a speculative feminist short story collection, Esther Park’s LADY MUNBIN: GHOST-STALKER (translated by Gene Png), a gender-flipped Joseon court romantasy, and Seo Dongwon’s cosy fantasy THE BOOKSHOP FOR DRINKING MOON GLOW (both to Wildfire, Hachette). She is growing this Korean list and will also be looking for French fiction.
Her Korean heritage and upbringing in Asia explain her soft spot for writing from or about East Asia in both original English and in translation. At the top of her present wishlist are family sagas, stories spanning multiple generations, horror amplified (rather than lightened) by dark humour, fantasy with romance (rather than romance with fantasy), socially-inflected psychological thrillers, expert-led non-fiction in self-help/personal development, investigative journalism on topics related to the beauty industry (like plastic surgery) and writing by academics on art history and non-canonical literature.
Please do not send her police procedurals, straight crime, WW1 or WW2 historical fiction, literary memoir, science-related subject-led non-fiction, autofiction, very commercial romance or hard science fiction.
For submissions from East and Southeast Asia, please refer to our guidelines. If you have a campus novel, you might magically levitate to the top of her inbox…