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Literary agent Deborah Rogers has been awarded The London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement in International Publishing Award 2014.
Rogers, the c.e.o. of Rogers, Coleridge & White (RCW), has been an agent her whole career, setting up her own agency in 1967. Her authors include Angela Carter, A S Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Thomas Pynchon and Ian McEwan.
Industry figures praised her career. Penguin Random House UK chair Dame Gail Rebuck said: “Deborah is a legendary agent who has made an unsurpassed contribution to a thriving publishing business. Her entrepreneurial spirit in setting up an agency in the 1960s and seeing it grow successfully, adding brilliant new agents over the years is beyond compare.”
McEwan said she offered writers and publishers: “infinite care, kindness, hospitality, patience, fierce loyalty, very sound critical judgement and good taste... The desk in her office, dangerously piled to the ceiling, is an indispensable feature of literary London, and is a monument to a generous, richly creative, hugely well-read and warm-hearted spirit."
Rogers gave thanks to her authors, and said: “It hardly seems fair to be given an award for what has been a lifetime of such pleasure... Those who have entrusted their work to us over the years will never know the intense pride that they have brought, and the anticipation and excitement that greets each new manuscript never palls. I have them to thank most of all.”
The award will be presented at an invite-only LBF event on 8th April. It is judged by the London Book Fair Advisory Board, and has previously been given to figues such as Lord Weidenfeld, Christopher MacLehose, and Michael Krüger.