A new start after 60: after a decade of rejections, I got my first novel published. Now I’ve got my dream, I won’t stop!

A new start after 60: after a decade of rejections, I got my first novel published. Now I’ve got my dream, I won’t stop!

After a successful career as a talent agent – representing Michael Parkinson, Ulrika Jonsson and Adam Ant – Melanie Cantor became disillusioned with TV. So she took up writing – and refused to give up on her passion.

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At 61, after a decade writing four unpublished manuscripts and receiving hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, Melanie Cantor got an email in 2019 from the literary agent Felicity Blunt. “It started off positively and I was just waiting for the ‘but’ to arrive, but it never did,” Cantor says. “She said she wanted to represent me.”

In 2020, Dorset-based Cantor’s debut novel Life and Other Happy Endings, about a woman with three months to live who spends her remaining time writing letters to those who have wronged her, came out. Its publication was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with writing.

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