Amanda Urban
Amanda "Binky" Urban is an American literary agent and partner at ICM Partners.
Urban started at ICM as a literary agent, worked as Co-Director of the ICM Literary Department in New York, and had been Managing Director of ICM Books in London from 2002 to 2008. Before ICM, she was General Manager of New York Magazine and The Village Voice, and Editorial Manager of Esquire Magazine.
In December 2010, the Center for Fiction awarded Amanda Urban the Maxwell E. Perkins Award in recognition of her work and contribution to the field of fiction writing. She was the first book agent selected to receive the award.
Urban attended Kent Place School and graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts as an English major in 1968.
She has represented Lynsey Addario, Lori Andrews, Roger Angell, Marie Arana, James Atlas, Maziar Bahari, Julia Baird, Jen Beagin, Amanda Bennett, David Bezmozgis, MacKenzie Bezos, Fatima Bhutto, Laszlo Bock, William Boyd, Rick Bragg, Elaine Brown, Dominique Browning, Christopher Buckley, Jon Clinch, Thomas Cobb, Roger Cohen, Nik Cohn, Robert Coles, George Howe Colt, Avery Corman, George Crile, Rodney Crowell, Jonathan Dee, E L Doctorow, Anthony Doerr, Tony Dokoupil, Bruce Duffy, Stuart Dybek, Jennifer Egan, Bret Easton Ellis, Nora Ephron, Dexter Filkins, William Finnegan, Helen Fisher, Jory Fleming, Richard Ford, Kristina Ford, Charles Frazier, Nell Freudenberger, Alan Furst, David Gates, Mark Leyner & Billy Goldberg, Paul Goldberger, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Allan Gurganus, Jane Hamilton, Kathryn Harrison, Adam Haslett, Anne C. Heller, James Leo Herlihy, Alice Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Siri Hustvedt, Gerald Imber, Walter Isaacson, Chris Jennings, Michiko Kakutani, Mieko Kawakami, Chip Kidd, Natsuo Kirino, Naomi Klein, Norman Lear, Nicholas Lemann, Lawrence Lessig, Mark Leyner, Atticus Lish, Margot Livesey, Kati Marton, Bobbie Ann Mason, Armistead Maupin, Cormac McCarthy, Robert McCrum, Terry McDonell, Jay McInerney, Maile Meloy, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, Nancy Milford, Steven Millhauser, Pankaj Mishra, Toni Morrison, Nadia Murad, Haruki Murakami, Charles Murray, Victor Navasky, Robert O'Connor, Yeonmi Park, Kevin Peraino, Marisha Pessl, Michael Pollan, Sunita Puri, Anna Quindlen, Steven Rattner, Richard Reeves, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Carole Bayer Sager, James Salter, Michael Scammell, Elaine Scarry, John Burnham Schwartz, , David Sheff, Nic Sheff, Mona Simpson, Deborah Solomon, Edward Sorel, Michael Specter, James B. Stewart, Donna Tartt, Gillian Tett, Evan Thomas, Jeremy Treglown, Clarissa Ward, James D. Watson, Patricia Wells, Barry Werth, Edmund White, E.B. White, Isabel Wilkerson, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop, Tobias Wolff, Sally Bedell Smith, Geoffrey Wolff, and Jim Yardley, among others.