The most powerful man in publishing?
Andrew Wylie: 'I'm a books person. Yes, I have a Kindle. I used it for an hour and a half and put it in the closet'

Andrew 'the Jackal' Wylie reveals how he became the feared king of the literary jungle and agent to the book world's biggest names – Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth and Martin Amis

Robert McCrum in The Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010

Left -Andrew Wylie. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

This weekend the London Book Fair is attracting a stream of literary agents, publishers and bibliophiles to Olympia for an event that now rivals Frankfurt as an international literary marketplace. Among those roaming the aisles, there will be the numerous foot soldiers of the Wylie Agency, the most feared and most influential authors' representatives in the world of Anglo-American publishing. These are the agents who report to the elusive figure of Andrew Wylie, an American literary bull on first-name terms with many of the greatest writers at work today, from Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe to VS Naipaul and Philip Roth.

Their boss is an enigmatic figure. He is also undeniably one of the most powerful man in the books industry. On the eve of the London event, he gave the Observer a rare and fascinating interview in a surprisingly anonymous Manhattan office.

We spoke in the late afternoon, but most mornings in New York City, Wylie is up at 5am, "staggering about in the dark", he says, before settling down to tackle between 40 and 50 emails from as far afield as Tokyo, St Petersburg and Cairo. This self-professed global literary agent, who represents about 700 writers, dead and alive, including Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Alaa al Aswany, Arthur Miller and Art Spiegelman, certainly has the spooky pallor of a man who does a lot of business in the dark.

Today he comes to greet me in the tranquil, overheated hallway of his 12th-floor office as the day closes and the evening light merges into the fluorescent glare of uptown off-Broadway. In person, Wylie is slight, courteous and soft-spoken – as if with his dark suit and formal good manners he can live down his reputation as competitive, self-willed, transgressive and ruthless.

The contrast between his polite self-presentation and his erstwhile reputation as a hell-raiser and "a lizard" makes for an edgy formality. But it doesn't take long for his sardonic bad-boy self to break through the mask. Wylie's minimalist office displays several promotional copies of the Nabokov backlist in various foreign editions. When I comment on the number of literary estates (Borges, Mishima, Waugh, Lampedusa and Updike, to name some of the most prominent) controlled by the Wylie Agency, he says, with a mirthless laugh: "People are dying like flies." It's at moments like this that you can see why, in the Anglo-American book world, he is known, simply as "the Jackal".

Once a more than slightly feral predator, however, Wylie has now become something far more menacing in the literary undergrowth. In a business environment where many of the principal publishers, booksellers and rival literary agents are reeling from the remorseless depredations of recession and digitisation (the IT revolution), he can make a good claim to be the most powerfully composed and uniquely global writers' representative on either side of the Atlantic, a king of the book publishing jungle.
Read McCrum's full piece at The Observer.