Xandra Bingley’s first job, at the age of eighteen, was as a ‘trainee spy’ for MI5. On moving to the US, she worked at the Buffalo University Poetry Library, annotating Dylan Thomas and Pamela Hansford-Johnson's love letters; at The Atlantic Monthly Review in Boston as a reader, and at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard as assistant to the Director. After a brief spell in Ireland she returned to London and moved into the house in Primrose Hill where she lives today. In London she worked at The New Review literary magazine before becoming a publisher’s reader and then commissioning editor at Jonathan Cape. She then started her own literary agency, which she ran for 15 years, representing Ali Smith, Esther Freud, Geoff Dyer and Alasdair Gray amongst many others. Xandra’s wartime childhood memoir Bertie, May and Mrs Fish was published in the UK to great acclaim in 2005.
Xandra’s long involvement with writers and publishing have led to many friendships, including with Robert Lowell, John Ashbery and Caroline Blackwood, as well as Margaret Atwood, with whom she has been friends for more than 30 years.
