Mia Council

Hi, I’m Mia! I’m an editor at Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, which I joined in November 2025. Previously, I began my career at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency and spent eight years at Penguin Press, a nonfiction-focused imprint of Penguin Random House. At Penguin Press, publications included Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld, My First Book by Honor Levy, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of the American Suburbs by Benjamin Herold, and The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, ed. Rabih Alameddine and John Freeman. I acquire both fiction and nonfiction and am proud to have been recommended on Perfectly Imperfect. For my list at Hanover Square, I’m especially interested in:* Books bringing science and math to a wider audience
* Elevated and big-idea-inflected self-help; some favorites of mine (that I didn’t work on) in this area are 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, and Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
* Narrative nonfiction, history, and journalism; I loved Alpha by David Phillips and was honored to work on Empire of AI by Karen Hao and Capitalism by Sven Beckert
* Work on religion and spirituality from the inside; I'm a huge fan of Barbara Brown Taylor
* Fiction with both a writerly sensibility and a sense of plot and forward motion; I especially loved Rejection by Tony Tulithamutte, Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang, Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, and American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
* Genre-inflected fiction that circles around a unique premise, such as Lexicon by Max Barry or Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
* Memoir, especially that gets at a specific issue or experience; I loved The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Hinton, The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, and Grief is for People by Sloane CrosleyNo unagented submissions, thank you.