Consummate book broker

Paul Marsh, literary agent. Died aged 57.

International literary agent Paul Marsh was celebrated for selling British and international authors around the world and ensuring they were published in many languages.

His agency represented a dazzling array of writers including Kate Atkinson, Bill Bryson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Forster, Desmond Morris, Vikram Seth and Ben Okri.

He sold Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and was published in 35 languages including Indonesian, Catalonian, Macedonian and Icelandic.

And what can they have made of Sue Townsend's satire of Thatcherite Britain, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, in Slovakia, Galicia or the Basque country?

Most authors, and literary novelists, cannot make a living from their domestic sales alone, so they depend heavily on international sales.

Paul Marsh was one of the key players in this globalisation of literary culture. He was the consummate broker, linking authors and publishers across a wide range of languages.

He was born in East London and educated at Dulwich College before going to Cambridge, where he read English. He went on to perfect his German at Gottingen University and his languages, which included French and Italian, were invaluable in selling rights internationally.

His career in books began when he joined Anthony Sheil Associates as a junior assistant in 1977, but he was promoted rapidly to foreign rights director in 1979, and subsequently negotiated an innovative joint venture, Marsh & Sheil, to sell international rights.

In 1994 he took the bold step of setting up the Marsh Agency with his wife, Susanna Nicklin, as international book-rights specialists.

In sophisticated markets, like Germany or the Netherlands, the agency runs tough auctions sometimes running into hundreds of thousands of euros. Others have just a handful of publishers, selling a few hundred copies of each title.

Very often the local publisher cannot read the language. If this is the case, they have to buy the rights on trust, perhaps paying many times more than their own salary.

This was the secret of Marsh's success. He had an English understatedness and quiet authority based on thoughtful literary judgment rather than pushiness or hype. He was always keener to do the deal and see the book well published and sold in bookshops than to extract the last ounce of blood.

- INDEPENDENT