In 1939, the married couple Hugo Lifczis and Annie R. Shermant fled Vienna because of the rise of Nazism. After settling in Buenos Aires, they founded International Editors’ Co. (IECO), the first Spanish-language co-agency. Hugo, a lawyer, and Annie, a literary translator and member of a family of theatre publishers, began to defend the copyrights of their friends, prestigious writers such as Vicki Baum, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Alexander Lernet Holenia, Franz Werfel, among many others.

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The Lifczis moved to Barcelona in 1960, where they inaugurated the new IECO headquarters; Nicolás Costa remained in charge of the Buenos Aires office. In 1966 Isabel Monteagudo joined IECO-Barcelona, which she headed after the death of Dr. Lifczis and the return of Mrs. Shermant to her native Vienna in 1970.

In 1998 Maru de Montserrat joined the agency’s team and began to represent authors in Spanish and Catalan.  In 2014 IECO-Barcelona acquired the Argentinian office, and in 2021 IECO added the agency Julio. F. Yáñez, another very old agency with a very similar trajectory. International Editors’ Co. & Yáñez was born, formed by 14 people and directed by Maru de Montserrat.

IECO Yáñez is the oldest Spanish-speaking agency and the only one that had offices in Spain and Latin America until a few years ago. In addition, since its foundation it has had a department of dramatic rights, mainly by prestigious German authors: Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Falk Richter, etc.

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IECO Yáñez represents a wide range of publishers and literary agencies, mainly from the USA, Germany, Canada and the UK, and some from Australia, China, Italy and Japan, in all Spanish-speaking countries, Portugal and Brazil. We are pleased to be the co-agents of contemporary classics such as Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger and Günter Grass among many others, and of best-sellers such as Brandon Sanderson, Kristin Hannah, Mary Higgins Clark, Mitch Albom, Jacqueline Kelly, Leigh Bardugo, etc. On the other hand, IECO Yañez represents since more than twenty-five years modern Spanish and Latin American classics such as Augusto Monterroso, Ramón J. Sender and Javier Tomeo as well as contemporary authors of all genres such as María Fernanda Ampuero, Natza Farré, Marta Pessarrodona, Marilar Aleixandre or Fernando Trías de Bes.