Bryan honoured by Washington Post

The Laurence Stern Fellowship, a long-standing programme of the Washington Post, giving young British journalists experience of working in its newsroom each summer, is being renamed in honour of agent Felicity Bryan as the Stern-Bryan Fellowship.

Bryan, who co-founded the fellowship, has been credited as "a driving force" behind it since its inception in 1980, and for the past 40 years it has sent a young British journalist to work on the Post every year.

"Larry Stern was the inspiration for this fellowship. Felicity is the unstoppable engine who made this program the success that it is," Post executive editor Marty Baron said. "With one American and one Brit, the hyphenated name also matches the fellowship's transatlantic ideals."

Bryan said she was "delighted and moved" by the news. “Ben Bradlee once said to me that the Stern Fellowship was one of the things he was most proud to be associated with, and I feel the same," she said.

Among the fellowship's alumni are journalists Lionel Barber, former editor of the Financial Times; David Leigh and Gary Younge, formerly of the Guardian; James Naughtie of the BBC; Cathy Newman and Ian Katz of Channel 4; and Louisa Loveluck, now the Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief.

Bryan previously worked as a journalist in Washington, DC. It was was announced last week that she is retiring as a literary agent and is stepping back from the day-to-day involvement with the agency because she is being treated for stomach cancer.