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In 2016, novelist Simon Trewin, who has died of a brain tumor aged 60, received a copy from Paul Lynch, a Limerick-born author with two critically acclaimed books to his credit. No publisher wanted a Wednesday. “I want to save your job,” Trewin said.
It took 14 months to make the deal. Grace became the Kerry Group Irish book of the year 2018. Five years later, her confidence grew, Lynch won the Booker prize for his dystopian metaphor Prophet Song. Trewin was the first person to acknowledge: “Thank you,” said Lynch, “for being my assistant.”
Some helpers are good weather friends. Not Simon Trewin. He stood up for me for 30 years, taking my first book when I was a school student. Like all of his clients, I can count on his honesty, integrity, intelligence, and poker-focused negotiation skills that belie his natural shyness.
During his career, he gathered a group of writers who followed him from company to company, and finally, to freedom. He was the first and only author of the book John Boynethe author of A Boy in Striped Clothes. Signed YA author Catherine Banner when he was 16. He gave Chloe EspositoWith the titles of his thriller trilogy, He’s crazy (2017), Bad (2018) and Dangerous to Know (2020) – and helped him raise £2m.
There was a family heirloom to discuss. Simon’s grandfather was a theater critic JC Trewin and Wendy Trewin (with Monk). His father, Ion Trewinhe was the writing editor of the Times and publishing director of Hodder & Stoughton, where he discovered and edited Thomas Keneally. Schindler’s Ship.
Simon’s mother, Sue (nee Merry) was a family guidance counselor who inherited his interviewing skills. No one escaped his curious and playful questions: customers, people he met on the street, carers who found him when he was last sick.
Born in north London, Simon, like his father, attended Highgate school. Unlike his father, he also went to university, studying drama in Kent. His sporting interests extended beyond his degree: on a school trip to East Berlin, he was detained for eight hours at Checkpoint Charlie for wearing an advertising badge. Dario FoAccidental Death of an Anarchist.
He also survived his degree: he was a stage assistant in West End shows (Harold Pinter‘s The Caretaker with Donald Pleasence; Ronald Harwood‘s Sometimes it is Albert Finney) and during the panto and summer seasons. A favorite anecdote happened backstage Rod Hull and Emu. Despite Hull’s self-confidence, Simon noticed that Emu had turned and started reading the company’s sign as he walked down the corridor.
The 1991 revival of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister was the biggest hit of his life – not least because he messed up the song that made the star famous. Derek Nimmoraising the flute to his lips and uttering a flute-like sound. One scene required him to stand in the wings and present a surrogate child to Helen Adie, the French actress, Angèle. They married in 1992 at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, the theater church. Their son Jack was born a year later, by this time Simon had deviated from the path that would have taken him from ASM to company manager, and joined a literary agency.
Shell Land Associates it was his first home, then Peters Fraser and Dunlopbefore laying the groundwork United Agents is a peer group in 2007popular divisions in business. At United he stood for Ian Fleming. He was impressed by her style and sense of humor. (It’s safe to say that he didn’t take formal meetings – in fancy little offices where Martinis were endlessly shaken – as seriously as some of the participants.) He loved gossip and vice: he once sold a memoir to Cliff Richard. He said: “It is printed on two lines so you can read between the lines.”
In 2012 he shocked some of his colleagues by leaving United for the London office of an international talent agency. William Morris Endeavour. The move satisfied his restless spirit and allowed him to acquire two vintage sports cars (one red, one Yves Klein blue), but the office environment did not appeal to him. Implementation its own independent agency in 2019 he released him in London and Los Angeles hours at a time, developing an interest that began when he was 10 when his father took him to the Times printworks on Gray’s Inn Road.
The purchase of the Gloria, an 1870 printing press of the type previously used by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, was a major turning point in his life in inky. He set up a workshop, Garage Press, and later, The Press at Bell House, a voluntary educational center in Dulwich, south London.
There, he ran a printing house, collected manuscripts, made his own ink from oak apple galls, risked his fingers, and gathered a group of like-minded “inkaholics” to collaborate with the writers he had already collected. On his 60th birthday, a few weeks after he was diagnosed with the tumor, he gathered us together, in a room full of his writings.
He has survived and Helenthe artist and poet, and his son, Jackhe is also an artist.
