Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

In my lecture, I focus on the first three decades of the literary agency International Editors’ Co. (since 2021 International Editors & Yañez, Co.), founded in Buenos Aires in 1939 by Annie and Hugo Lifczis (Lifezis). On the basis of various archive collections, I show the genesis of the agency’s network during the German exile, especially in the correspondence with the author Leo Perutz. The second part follows the agency’s move to Barcelona and the competition in the 1960s with Carmen Balcells. I would like to ask to what extent Lifczis’ practice of mediating German authors in exile between 1939 and 1945 was a model for Balcells’ worldwide mediation of Latin American authors.

Speakers Bio:
Professor Alexander Nebrig is Chair of Modern German Literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. In addition to German literary history, his focus is on Literary Ethics, Writing Theory, Comparative Literature, Translation and Book Studies. Currently, he is leading a DFG-funded database project on translation rights. He is co-editor of the Handbuch Verlag (Metzler 2026) and author of the study Literature and Translation in the Licensing Realm (2 vol., Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).