In 2016, the literary agent Simon Trewin, who has died of a brain tumour aged 60, received a copy of a manuscript by Paul Lynch, a Limerick-born author with two respectfully reviewed novels behind him. No publisher wanted his third. “I want to save your career,” Trewin said.
It took 14 months to make the deal. Grace became the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year 2018. Five years later, his confidence boosted, Lynch won the Booker prize for his dystopian parable Prophet Song. Trewin was the first person he acknowledged: “Thank you,” Lynch said, “for being my consigliere.”
Some agents are fair-weather friends. Not Simon Trewin. He represented me for 30 years, taking on my first book when I was still a postgraduate student. Like all his clients, I could depend on his honesty, his loyalty, his wit, and the poker-faced negotiating skills that belied his natural shyness.
During his career, he gathered a community of writers who followed him from company to company, and finally, to independence. He was the first and only literary agent of John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. He signed the YA novelist Catherine Banner when she was 16. He gave Chloé Esposito’s the titles for her trilogy of thrillers, Mad (2017), Bad (2018) and Dangerous to Know (2020) – and helped her secure deals worth £2m.
There was a family legacy to negotiate. Simon’s grandparents were the theatre critics JC Trewin and Wendy Trewin (nee Monk). His father, Ion Trewin, was literary editor of the Times and publishing director of Hodder & Stoughton, where he acquired and edited Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark.
Simon’s mother, Sue (nee Merry) was a marriage guidance counsellor from whom he inherited his interrogative talents. Nobody escaped his curious and often playful questions: clients, people he met on the street, the carers who attended him in his final illness.
Born in north London, Simon, like his father, went to Highgate school. Unlike his father, he also went to university, studying drama at Kent. His theatrical interests predated his degree: on a school trip to East Berlin, he was detained for eight hours at Checkpoint Charlie because he was wearing a badge advertising a production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
They also survived his degree: he was assistant stage manager on West End shows (Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker with Donald Pleasence; Ronald Harwood’s Another Time with Albert Finney) and in panto and summer seasons. A favourite anecdote involved a backstage encounter with Rod Hull and Emu. Though Hull believed himself alone, Simon noticed that Emu turned to read the company noticeboard as he passed along the corridor.
A 1991 revival of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister was a landmark in his life – and not just because he mistimed a sound cue that resulted in the star, Derek Nimmo, raising a flute to his lips and producing the sound of bagpipes. One scene required him to stand in the wings and pass a prop baby to Helen Adie, the actor playing the French maid, Angèle. They married in 1992 at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, the actors’ church. Their son Jack was born a year later, by which time Simon had swerved from the path that would have led him from the role of ASM to company manager, and joined a literary agency.
Sheil Land Associates was his first home, then Peters Fraser and Dunlop, before he founded United Agents with a group of colleagues in 2007, a famous schism in the business. At United he represented the Ian Fleming estate. It appealed to his sense of style and his sense of humour. (It would be safe to say that he did not take the ritualised meetings – in achingly stylish offices where Martinis were shaken endlessly – as seriously as some of the participants.) He loved gossip and mischief: he once sold a memoir by Cliff Richard. “It’s printed double-spaced,” he said, “so you can read between the lines.”
In 2012 he baffled some of his colleagues by leaving United to head the London office of the global talent agency William Morris Endeavor. The move satisfied his restless instincts and allowed him to acquire two vintage sports cars (one red, one Yves Klein blue), but the office culture did not delight him. Founding his own independent agency in 2019 freed him from working London and Los Angeles hours simultaneously, and to develop a passion that first stirred at the age of 10 when his father took him to the Times printworks on the Gray’s Inn Road.
The acquisition of Gloria, an 1870s platen press of the type once used by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, was key to the inky turn in his life. He established a workshop, the Garage Press, and subsequently, the Print Room at Bell House, a volunteer-run community education centre in Dulwich, south London.
There, he ran printing workshops, collected block type, made his own ink from oak apple gall, risked his fingers in the mechanism, and gathered a community of like-minded “inkaholics” to join the writers he had already assembled. On his 60th birthday, a few weeks after his tumour diagnosis, he gathered us together, in a room full of his prints.
He is survived by Helen, an artist and poet, and his son, Jack, also an artist.
• Simon Courtenay Trewin, literary agent, born 24 May 1966; died 25 June 2026
