Literary Agent Deborah Rogers remembered for 'wisdom, delight and love'

Published October 2, 2014. By Benedicte Page - The Bookseller

A remarkable 750-strong gathering of authors and book industry colleagues joined family and friends for the memorial service for agent Deborah Rogers in St-Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square yesterday (1st October).

Rogers, chairman of agency Rogers, Coleridge and White, died suddenly in May.

The service, at which moving speeches were delivered by publishers Gail Rebuck, Carmen Callil, Liz Calder and Bob Gottlieb, Rogers, Coleridge and White colleague Peter Straus, as well as authors Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Paul Bailey and Tony Scotland, was said by some attendees to have been the finest such service they had ever attended. 

In his address to the congregation, McEwan noted that the self-effacing Rogers would have been "amazed…and probably embarrassed" by the prolific turn-out, which included a roster of the industry's most prominent figures, as well as international publishers from far afield, and authors including Philip Hensher, Michael Frayn, William Boyd and Sally Vickers.
Rogers' qualities of warmth, humour, acute literary perception and "caritas" - compassionate charity – were highlighted by many speakers.

Peter Carey remembered first meeting her in London in 1968, when he was an unpublished writer of 25, "sceptical to the point of paranoia", and presenting her "with a novel of such gritty avant-garde integrity that it had no commercial potential at all – I was proud of that." Rogers said: "Well! What is it? What do you mean? Well, it's not literature, is it?" Carey remembered: "She was perfectly correct. Thank God it never found a publisher."

Paying tribute to Rogers as "the greatest agent of our times", he said: "I thought so often of my good fortune, as Deborah fought for me… put up with bouts of rage and hysteria, and poured champagne." He described her as a "genius… she could see what was not here yet.. what a prickly young Australian did not know he had. My heart is overflowing with grief and love and gratitude."   

Ishiguro said Rogers had a "profound" influence on him, teaching him to take himself seriously as a writer, and not to be distracted by the superficial. "Five months after she left, I find in myself a curious new feeling – I am less afraid of death now that Deborah has gone there before me," he said. "If her wise, benevolent, humour-filled realm now extends to death, then somehow death has become less fearful." He added that it was "the habit of a lifetime to be reassured and given encouragement by Deborah", calling her "strong but gentle, infinitely kind."
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