U.K. literary agent Gillon Aitken died October 28, the Bookseller reported. In the mid 1970s, he left his position as managing director of publisher Hamish Hamilton to found the Gillon Aitken literary agency. From 1986, it was run as Wylie, Aitken & Stone until Andrew Wylie left in 1996 to set up his own agency. Clare Alexander became a literary agent in 1998 and the company became Aitken Alexander Associates.
"A towering figure in so many of our lives, publishing has lost a great agent from a brilliant generation," Alexander said. "He was a wise counsel, a true intellectual and an irreplaceable friend. I am sure he would wish to be remembered in the words of some of the many authors who valued his guidance deeply and who came to love him so much."
Sebastian Faulks described Aitken as "one of my closest friends. He was also my literary agent for 30 years. He was a wonderful mixture of the grand and the modest: lofty, amusing, well-connected but warm in friendship and with little personal pride."
Helen Fielding called him "the quintessential British gentleman. His decency, dazzlingly dry wit, stoicism, wisdom, erudition, kindness, elegance and huge sense of fun represented the best of traditional British values.... He was a rare and irreplaceable treasure in the literary world."