At 61, after a decade writing four unpublished manuscripts and receiving hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, Melanie Cantor got an email in 2019 from the literary agent Felicity Blunt.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.
