Felicity Bryan dies

News - Publishing Monday, 22 June 2020, BookBrunch
Agent dies of cancer at the age of 74

Felicity Bryan, founder of literary agency Felicity Bryan Associates, has died at the age of 74. News of her death came less than two weeks after an announcement that she was stepping down from the agency (BookBrunch story). 

Her husband Alex Duncan and their sons Max and Ben issued the following statement: 

"Our deeply-loved Felicity died on Sunday 21 June, at home as she had wished. 

"In the last few months Felicity has shown more clearly than ever why so many have loved and admired her. Her courage and resilience that have been called on so many times in her life have been manifest in the calm and realism with which she faced her final illness, and in the happiness she said she felt in recent weeks. She showed her joy in life and sense of fun by the delight she has taken in so much since the diagnosis in summer 2019: travelling to Spain twice, to Sicily in November, to Dresden, and to the Jaipur Literary Festival in February; cooking much of the food for a late-summer party in the garden; the honour the Washington Post gave her by renaming the Laurence Stern Fellowship, from now on the Stern-Bryan Fellowship; looking over the summer garden from her bed in her last days; and, stylishly dressed, receiving her MBE on Friday, two days before she died, in a small ceremony at home. 

"She has taken great care to ensure that her authors will be well looked after by her colleagues at Felicity Bryan Associates, and when already very ill she started a series of weekly emails about authors' newly published books whose launches were adversely affected by Covid. 

"She took particular pleasure in the hundreds of messages of farewell, written from the heart by friends and colleagues. 

"As Felicity has asked, there will be a small cremation that will be followed in a few months' time by a memorial event in London, when conditions allow her friends to come together." 

Felicity Bryan worked as a reporter for the Financial Times and the Economist before starting her career as an agent at Curtis Brown in 1972. She founded Felicity Bryan Associates in Oxford in 1988. 

Her authors, as reported in an obituary in the Washington Post, included Karen Armstrong, Mary Berry, Francis Crick, Gerald Durrell, Lindsey Hilsum, James Naughtie, Iain Pears, Rosamunde Pilcher, Edmund de Waal and Sue Stuart-Smith. 

Bryan was an author herself, of books including The Town Gardener's Companion (Collins, 1981), and she wrote a gardening column for the London Evening Standard.