Derek Johns, Agent to Martel, Barry and Jan Morris, Dies at 78

Derek Johns, a bookseller and publisher who became one of London's most respected literary agents, died on July 24, 2026. He was 78. The Bookseller published its obituary on August 5. The Telegraph followed on August 7.

His list was literary fiction, and it was a long one. Writers he represented included Jan Morris, Yann Martel, Sebastian Barry, Andrew O'Hagan, Linda Grant and Rohinton Mistry. The Bookseller also named Jon Ronson, Claire Messud, Amit Chaudhuri and Louisa Young. The Telegraph added Graham Swift. The deal the trade still talks about is Life of Pi.

From the shop floor to AP Watt

Johns was born Derek Alan Johns in Bath on July 5, 1948, the eldest of five children of Oliver Johns, a butcher, and Joan, née Sherry. He left school at 17 without sitting A-levels, worked in Australia and New Zealand, and came back to England through the music business, where he later liked to say he had turned down both David Bowie and Queen. Books suited him better.

The Bookseller placed the start of that career at Hampstead's High Hill Bookshop, the shop Ian Norrie made a centre of literary London. Johns later wrote the Guardian obituary when Norrie died in 2009. He published a novel, moved to New York, worked in a Manhattan bookshop, and became an editor at Random House. The Telegraph said he was assistant there to Erroll McDonald, Toni Morrison's editor. Back in London he worked at Harrap and as a figure at The Bodley Head, then as managing director of Granta in the years of Bill Buford's editorship. The Bookseller records him as managing director of both The Bodley Head and Granta.

In 1992 he crossed into agenting and joined AP Watt, which he ran with Caradoc King until they sold the business to United Agents in 2012. From 2003 to 2006 he was president of the Association of Authors' Agents. He retired the year after the sale. He told The Bookseller then that "my years with AP Watt have been the happiest of my career," and that he would "remain in the world of writers and writing, but in different ways." Those ways included the advisory committee of the Booker Prize, a trusteeship at English PEN, and the Queen's Park Book Festival, where the Telegraph said he booked speakers including Zadie Smith, Alan Bennett and Eleanor Catton. The Telegraph also recorded him as an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Life of Pi, and the clients who stayed

Life of Pi had already been published in Canada and the United States when Johns had to find it a British home. The Telegraph reported that the offers from Canongate and Faber were the same, and that Johns persuaded Martel to take the smaller Edinburgh house. Martel told the Telegraph: "I wasn't at all sure about that. Surely, I wanted a London publisher, not an Edinburgh one? But Derek's judgment turned out to be spot-on. He was so much a part of the magical start to life that Life of Pi had. He really shepherded me." The Telegraph put worldwide sales at 15 million, more than any other Booker winner, with a film adaptation in 2012.

He was just as important to Sebastian Barry, twice a Costa Book of the Year winner, for The Secret Scripture (2008) and Days Without End (2017). Barry kept Johns on after the supposed retirement in 2013. In 2026 Johns, working with Matthew Marland at RCW, sold Barry's novel The Newer World to Faber.

Andrew O'Hagan, who signed with him despite other offers, told the Telegraph: "I knew from the beginning that Derek was right for me. I found him gently humorous and I could see that he was ambitious for me. The thing about Derek was he raised people's moral game. They behaved better when they were around him, which I think is always a sign of a first-rate person. He was the perfect gentleman who created such an aura around his authors that publishers would want to publish them."

Not every project closed. In 2011 Johns was involved in a memoir by Julian Assange that Andrew O'Hagan was to ghostwrite. Assange pulled out. The Telegraph said even Johns's diplomacy could not save it.

Johns also wrote. The Bookseller lists the novels Wintering and Wakening, the Billy Palmer Chronicles, and Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris (2016), which Colin Thubron called an affectionate tribute. The Telegraph said he never owned a mobile phone. His marriage to Jayne Reich was dissolved. He is survived by two sisters and two brothers.

Image: The Creaking Shelves Bookshop, Wigtown, December 12, 2010. Not a portrait of Derek Johns; no freely licensed photograph of him was available. Photo by John Ferguson, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Placed on a blurred extension of the same photo.

Sources

• The Bookseller: Derek Johns, influential publisher and agent, dies (August 5, 2026)
• The Telegraph, via Yahoo News: Derek Johns, literary agent whose clients included Jan Morris and Yann Martel (August 7, 2026)