Felicity Blunt is a British literary agent at Curtis Brown whose career has expanded from publishing into television production. She trained as a barrister before moving into the book world, joined Curtis Brown in 2005, and has since represented writers including Bonnie Garmus, Claire Keegan, Elizabeth Day, Meg Mason and Gillian McAllister.
She is also publicly known as the older sister of actor Emily Blunt and the wife of actor Stanley Tucci, but those relationships are only part of her story. Blunt had already built an established publishing career before marrying Tucci in 2012, and her professional profile has continued to grow through major book deals and, more recently, her work as an executive producer of the television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals.
A career that began with law rather than publishing
Blunt grew up as the eldest of four siblings in a household where reading was an important part of family life. Her first professional direction, however, was law.
She trained as a barrister and reached the stage of preparing to begin pupillage before deciding to pursue publishing instead. In interviews, Blunt has described that change as a move toward the field that better matched her longstanding interest in books.
Her route into publishing began with an internship at the Wylie Agency. She also worked at Curtis Brown and formally joined the agency in 2005. That decision established the career for which she is now chiefly known.
The move was not simply from one profession to another. Literary agents occupy a position between writers and publishers, helping shape manuscripts, negotiating book deals and managing rights across territories and formats. Blunt’s later career would show her working across all of those areas.
Building a career at Curtis Brown
One of Blunt’s earliest milestones as an agent came in 2008, when she sold Rosamund Lupton’s Sister. Blunt has identified it as the first book she sold in her own right.
Her list subsequently expanded across literary and commercial fiction, thrillers, nonfiction and cookery. By 2026, her current or recent clients included Claire Keegan, Bonnie Garmus, Elizabeth Day, Meg Mason and Gillian McAllister. Curtis Brown also identifies her as working with the estates of Daphne du Maurier and Jilly Cooper.
A 2026 profile reported that she represented more than 100 authors, although that figure is best understood as a snapshot of the scale of her work rather than a fixed client count.
What makes Blunt’s career more instructive than a simple list of well-known names is the extent to which she has been involved in developing and positioning books before publication. Her work with Bonnie Garmus provides a particularly clear example.
Lessons in Chemistry shows how Blunt works with authors
Blunt signed Bonnie Garmus when Lessons in Chemistry was still represented by only a partial manuscript. According to a detailed profile based on interviews with Blunt, she then worked with Garmus on the book’s development for more than a year.
The manuscript eventually went into a 16-way publishing auction.
That sequence illustrates the less visible side of literary representation. An agent’s role can begin well before a finished book reaches publishers and can involve editorial development as well as negotiations, rights strategy and long-term career planning.
For Blunt, Lessons in Chemistry became one of the clearest public examples of how her work combines identifying potential, helping shape a project and then taking it into a highly competitive market.
Jilly Cooper and Rivals moved her work into television
Blunt’s association with Jilly Cooper became particularly significant because it extended beyond book representation.
She represented Cooper during the final decade of the novelist’s life and later became an executive producer of Rivals, the television adaptation of Cooper’s novel. That role marked an important expansion of Blunt’s public career from literary agenting into screen production.
The series went on to win the 2025 International Emmy for Drama Series. The award belongs to the programme rather than to Blunt individually, but its success added to the prominence of a project on which she holds an executive-producing credit.
Her involvement has also continued beyond the initial run. Disney confirmed in June 2026 that six further episodes of the second season were scheduled for November 2026. Later that month, the company announced a 12-episode third season and again named Blunt among its executive producers.
That makes Rivals more than a one-off adaptation associated with one of her authors. It is now an ongoing television project in which she has a continuing credited role.
Her connection to Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci
Blunt’s family ties explain why many readers first encounter her name outside the publishing industry.
She is the older sister of actor Emily Blunt. Through Emily, Felicity also met Stanley Tucci, although the commonly repeated version of that story is sometimes oversimplified.
Blunt and Tucci first encountered one another at the 2006 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada, in which Tucci and Emily Blunt both appeared. They met again at Emily Blunt’s 2010 wedding to John Krasinski, after which their relationship developed.
Felicity Blunt and Stanley Tucci married in 2012. They have two children together, and Blunt is also stepmother to Tucci’s three older children.
Their professional lives have overlapped as well. In 2014, Blunt and Tucci co-authored The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends, published by Gallery Books.
Still, describing Blunt primarily through her marriage understates the chronology of her career. She had joined Curtis Brown seven years before marrying Tucci and had already begun building her own list of authors and publishing deals.
What is reliably known about her age
Public records give only limited information about Blunt’s birth date.
A Companies House filing records her birth month and year as August 1981. It does not provide an exact birthday.
There is also a minor conflict in recent published material: a Tatler profile dated June 2026 described her as 45, even though someone born in August 1981 would still have been 44 at that point. Because the records do not establish an exact date and the published ages do not align perfectly, a precise birthday should not be stated as fact.
Her relationship with the Women’s Prize
Blunt has also had a formal connection with the Women’s Prize.
Companies House records show that she became a director of the Women’s Prize Trust in November 2012 and resigned from that position on 25 June 2024. She has continued to appear in connection with the organisation, including at Women’s Prize LIVE in 2026, but she should not be described as a current director.
That distinction matters because older organisational pages can sometimes preserve titles that are no longer current.
Final thoughts
Felicity Blunt’s public profile sits at the intersection of publishing and screen adaptation, but her career is rooted firmly in literary representation. Her path from barrister training to Curtis Brown, her work on books such as Lessons in Chemistry, and her long association with authors including Jilly Cooper show a professional record that stands independently of her famous family connections.
Her role on Rivals has made that work more visible beyond publishing. With a third season already commissioned and Blunt continuing as an executive producer, her career now extends from discovering and representing books to helping carry literary properties into long-running television productions.
