Biography
Isabel Martin
What do you do? I am based in London, and work in the publishing industry for an international scouting agency. We work for publishers around the world, finding the best fiction, non-fiction and children's books from the UK, US and international markets to be published in translation. We also read for UK production companies looking for books to be adapted for film, television and audio. Scouts are sometimes referred to as the “spies” of the literary world, because our job is to know what books are on submission, what their market potential is like, and which ones stand out from the thousands of others. But I like to think of scouting as literary matchmaking.
How did the GNSS concentration shape your career? Gender & Sexuality Studies encourages students to think expansively and creatively, and to develop an interdisciplinary curiosity that has given me a leg up in an industry that’s all about making connections: across cultures, languages, disciplines, and genres. In scouting, I approach each interaction with a new book—whether it’s a pop science non-fiction book on the deep sea, an exquisite literary novella, or a speculative thriller—with that interdisciplinary curiosity I cultivated years ago at Pembroke!