Simon Trewin, a British literary agent who established the Garage Press and a volunteer-run community education center, died June 25. He was 60. In the Guardian, author Matthew Sweet wrote: "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, Trewin "gathered a community of writers who followed him from company to company, and finally, to independence," Street noted. He was the first and only literary agent for John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas). He signed YA novelist Catherine Banner when she was 16. He gave Chloé Esposito the titles for her trilogy of thrillers, Mad (2017), Bad (2018), and Dangerous to Know (2020)--and helped her secure deals worth £2 million (about $2.7 million).
Trewin began his career at Sheil Land Associates before moving on to Peters Fraser and Dunlop. In 2007, he founded United Agents with a group of colleagues and represented the Ian Fleming estate. 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," Street wrote.
After founding his own independent agency in 2019, he developed a passion that began 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 center in Dulwich, south London," Street noted. At Garage Press 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.
In 2016, Trewin received a copy of a manuscript by Paul Lynch, a Limerick-born author of two respectfully reviewed novels who had found little interest in his third. "I want to save your career," Trewin told him. "It took 14 months to make the deal," Street wrote. "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 for being my consigliere.' "