I’m Anna South, a London-based book editor, literary consultant and mentor with extensive experience and a long track record of collaboration with authors, agents and publishers.
I’ve spent over twenty-five years collaborating with established and debut authors to guide the development of their work. I work as a book editor on literary and commercial fiction, as well as general non-fiction and am an Associate Editor at The Literary Consultancy and a Bridport Prize shortlist reader (First Novel and Memoir). I also help authors prepare their submission package for agents, ensuring it’s market-ready and show them how to navigate a highly competitive marketplace.
If you entrust your writing to me, I’ll pinpoint how you can significantly improve it by addressing unresolved issues – conceptual, structural, thematic or stylistic – and enable you to make it the very best book it can be. By showing you how to maximise the potential of your work, hone its commercial viability and become a better writer, I’ll also teach you to be a more effective self-editor. My aim is always to be both sensitive and rigorous and, as one of my clients said, to ‘give you back the book you’d envisioned’.
I embark on every new manuscript with the curiosity of a die-hard reader and know how important it is for a writer to be able to trust an editor and to feel understood and have, consequently, developed a process that’s led to lots of my relationships with authors spanning many years.
Shortlist reader
Associate Editor
Snapshot fiction report | Full Fiction report | Submission Package report | Mentoring
