Liza Dawson

I’m really hoping to find an novel set in the French Revolution — or to find a writer who is interested in this period.  I have an idea for a novel that I’d like to share with the right person.  I’m also hungering for a literary mystery series set in Peking between World War I and II.

Small presses can be a good place to hone your writing skills, whether you’re writing mysteries or thrillers or women’s fiction, maybe it’s now time for an agent who deals with the Big Five.  I keep hoping to find my very own Eckhart Tolle or Pema Chodron.  Is there a contemporary Gail Sheehy out there who is researching and writing about women in their fifties who are trying to make sense of this new stage of life?

I’m always looking for storytellers. Hence my ongoing search for a dark, compelling contemporary novel about a former CIA agent who is afraid for her life.  I want a novel that can be compared as follows:  “Middlemarch meets Bonfire of the Vanities” — set in Washington D.C.  I’m an anglophile and I have a vision of a novel featuring a brilliant wizard who reads Dickens. Maybe that’s because social class fascinates me.

I want to be taken into a closed society and taught something: It might be set in an exotic location or involve religion or race or maybe it’s about Wall Street or the Middle East. Crux points in history fascinate me as do memoirs about women and men who have escaped from closed, repressive societies.  I like journalists and poets and have a weakness for humor and tenderness and a generous point of view as well as for cartoonists, quirky humorists and adventurers.

I hope this doesn’t make my taste sound too rarified because it’s not. There’s a big range of bookclub-type fiction and nonfiction and that is where I reside.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to queryliza@lizadawson.com

I prefer to see only a query letter first, please. If I am intrigued, I’ll ask to see a portion of the manuscript.

Guidelines & Details