Maria Cardona Serra

Maria Cardona Serra (Menorca, 1986) started her career at the Schavelzon Agency in 2010 and joined the Pontas Agency in 2014. There, she worked as a foreign rights as well as a primary agent selling domestic and translation rights directly in most markets, including the UK and the US as well as Europe. She has been involved in international bestsellers such as Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan and This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets. Her authors include Avni Doshi, finalist of the 2020 Booker Prize and the 2022 PEN Hemingway Award, Elena Medel, winner of the Umbral Award for Best Book of the Year, Shubhangi Swarup, shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize, and Lambda Fellow Javier Fuentes, amongst others.

Maria Cardona has a BA in Translation and Interpreting and a BA in Linguistics, both from the Pompeu Fabra University, and a Masters in Publishing (IDEC). She is a 2015 Frankfurt Fellow, a 2021 Taipei Rights Workshop Fellow and a 2022 Torino Book Fair Fellow. She lives in Barcelona.

She focuses in upmarket and literary fiction by authors who write in English and Spanish. Maria is an editorially minded agent that works closely with her authors with a long-term career plan. She is passionate about international voices and is used to working with authors that live in different corners of the world. She reads broadly yet is particularly drawn by character-driven, heart-wrenching fiction, modern love stories, and genre-bending upmarket crime. She is always looking for that perfect line that makes her thrill, paying special attention to the voice on the page and is always up for a surprise in a manuscript, looking for stories she hasn’t read before. She is also interested in narrative non-fiction about women’s experiences.