Quick snapshots from two long-time Frankfurt veterans, Kalem Agency and Italian Literary Agency, on their latest projects.

Merve Diler, left, and Nermin Mollaoğlu, Kalem Agency. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Olivia Snaije

By Olivia Snaije

See also: Nermin Mollaoğlu Opens a Press in the United Kingdom

Kalem Celebrates 20 Years at Frankfurt Book Fair

This is is the Kalem Agency’s 20th year at Frankfurter Buchmesse. Founder Nermin Mollaoğlu recalls her first Frankfurt as being painful. Because she didn’t know anyone, or because she felt lost? Because of my shoes, she replies. They were high-heeled back then. Today she is clad in green sneakers, with a matching green necklace.

Among some of the Publishing Perspectives readership’s best-known literary rights agents, Mollaoğlu began her career as a midwife, then taught literature and moved on to study economic law. Now, she says, her babies are books. She’s in Frankfurt with Merve Diler, part of the seven-women Kalem team at the trade show.

Diler has been with the agency for five years and handles international fiction.

Kalem just wrapped up the 15th edition of the Istanbul International Literature Festival (ITEF), which it has run since 2009. Olga Tokarczuk was the festival’s first guest, “before anyone knew who she was,” says Mollaoğlu.

This year she’s selling rights to her author Burhan Sönmez’s new nonfiction essay about art and humanity. Sönmez, whose books Mollaoğlu has sold into 46 languages, lives in the United Kingdom where he teaches at Cambridge University and is president of PEN International.

He wrote his new book in English.

See also: Nermin Mollaoğlu Opens a Press in the United Kingdom

At Frankfurt 38 Years for the Italian Literary Agency

Marco Vigevani, founding chairman of the Italian Literary Agency. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Olivia Snaije

It’s Marco Vigevani’s 38th Buchmesse. He’s head of the Italian Literary Agency (TILA) which he says just gave company shares to three of its agents in order to indicate how valuable they are, and to ensure the agency’s continuity.

One of the books he’s selling is Ugo Barbàra’s I Malarazza (Bad Breed). It’s a historical novel set in the 19th century between Sicily and New York. Vigevani has sold rights in the Netherlands and is negotiating a pre-empt in France.

Many of the agency’s books are in development as television series, such as Elsa Morante’s La Storia (TILA represents Morante’s estate) to Picomedia; Antonio Scurati’s M. Il figlio del secolo, the first volume of a fictional trilogy about Mussolini, to The Apartment/Fremantle; and Fabrizio Gatti’s Bilal, My Journey Undercover in the Market of the New Slaves to Indiana/Sky.

More from Publishing Perspectives on literary agents is here, more on the Turkish market is here, more on the Italian market is here,  and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.More from Publishing Perspectives on international rights is here.