'Passionate' David Miller remembered at memorial

Friends, family, colleagues and members of the wider book trade packed into the Union Chapel in Islington, north London yesterday (12th March) for heartfelt tributes to the life of Rogers Coleridge and White agent David Miller, who died last December.   
 
Peter Straus, m.d. of RCW described Miller as “a force for good in this world—committed, passionate and fearless”.  Picador associate publisher Ravi Mirchandani said that in the “publishing Tarot, David’s card would be The Storyteller”.
 
Bloomsbury’s group editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle said she admired Miller’s style as an agent: “Straightforward and frank, devoted to his authors and their books.”
 
Miller joined RCW in 1990 as an assistant to the agency’s co-founder Deborah Rogers. He quickly established himself as an agent in his own right, building a roster of clients including Victoria Hislop, Kate Summerscale, Ferdinand Mount, Nicola Barker and Ben Schott. He became an RCW director and won the Agent of the Year at the Nibbies in 2008. Miller was also an author himself, with his novel Today—based around the life of Joseph Conrad—published by Atlantic in 2011. He also edited 2014’s The Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written for Head of Zeus.     
 
Philip Gwyn Jones, editor-at-large of Scribe UK, paid tribute to Miller at the Union Chapel, saluting his “avuncular but acute irreverence”, and “his love of swearing in inappropriate places…he was puckish and punk-ish, and fought the good fight”.
 
Mount and Hislop were among the speakers, and fellow writers Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Porter were also in the congregation.
 
Mount said: “He was a therapist, a battery charger and a life coach.  He knew more about books than any publisher—and could write better than most of his clients”.