About
Literary Agent. Author. Scholar.
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Bio
A native New Yorker, Kristina is half-Argentine and half-Norwegian, and has spent nearly three decades living in Europe and Asia. Kristina has been a bookworm for as long as she can remember and has a decade of experience in publishing as both an author and an agent. She launched her own literary agency, Pérez Literary & Entertainment Ltd., in February 2023.
Education
Kristina’s first great literary love was Arthurian legend which led her to reading Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies for her BA and completing a PhD in Medieval Literature at the University of Cambridge. In between she pursued an MA in French Cultural Studies at Columbia University and then worked as a translator and women’s rights lobbyist in Paris. Kristina switched gears into journalism after her PhD, heading out to China in the run up to the 2008 Olympics.
She has held positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong. Her academic work is rooted in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory and she remains keenly interested in those fields. Her monograph, The Myth of Morgan la Fey was published by Palgrave Macmillan, using feminist psychoanalysis to recenter the famed sorceress at the heart of the Arthurian tradition.
Work
Kristina has also written several novels for young adults. The Sweet Black Waves trilogy draws on Kristina’s expertise in medieval literature to retell the legend of Tristan and Isolde, while The Tesla Legacy reimagines the classic superhero origin story with a precocious female scientist at its helm.
Kristina’s first novel for adults, The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins is forthcoming from Little, Brown UK. Loosely inspired by her years in Asia, this book club thriller is perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Taylor Jenkins Reid.
Agency
Being both an agent and an author allows Kristina to fully guide her clients through every step of the publishing process. She loves launching debut authors’ careers as well as working with mid-career authors looking for new challenges. Kristina sees each client relationship as a true partnership in which they develop the right strategy for a client’s career together. Author care is paramount and she prides herself on using her multifaceted understanding of the industry to help her clients achieve their goals. She is eager to work with writers from around the globe. She has a diverse client list and represents a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, from children’s to horror, current events to fantasy.