SUPER AGENT

JONNY GELLER

WHAT IS the biggest threat to reading in today’s culture? Pricecutting Amazon, or ghost-written celebrities? Library closures, or dwindling literacy? None of these, according to literary super-agent Jonny Geller. The answer is Netflix.

“It’s addictive,” he says, “and it’s good.” People are now as likely to gobble up box sets as thrillers. And so authors (like me) and agents (like him) must adapt to survive. He, at least, seems to be doing that rather successfully.

In the last year, Curtis Brown, the agency where he is joint CEO, has taken over three other businesses including the agency owned by the late Ed Victor, who personified the old-style, convivial publishing world of book deals struck over long lunches.

“Ed had a great life with his authors,” he says, “but there wasn’t a large amount of planning.” Curtis Brown, he adds, does things differently. “We’re building a business.”

That business isn’t scared of Netflix and co, because a decade ago they realised they were perfectly placed to create content for the large and small screen. The latest example is McMafia, coming to BBC1 on New Year’s Day, part-produced by Cuba Pictures, Curtis Brown’s film-making arm and based on a non-fiction book by one of the agency’s authors, Misha Glenny. Starring James Norton, it’s a drama based in the world of international organised crime, with a cast list including at least one shady Israeli businessman, filmed in 11 locations, including Belgrade, Belize, Qatar and Tel Aviv.

Curtis Brown represents screen writers, directors and actors as well as authors, so they knew the journey from selling screen options to finished product was slow and often unsuccessful. “It made sense to speed up the process,” says Geller, “and put money into developing projects of our own.” Their first film was Boy A, starring Andrew Garfield, and they were also behind the TV adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Curtis Brown has come a long way since it was set up in 1899. Geller says that even in the 1990s when he joined, it was still trading very much on its past, looking after the estates of luminaries such as Winston Churchill and John Steinbeck. But in 2001 there was a manage- ment buyout by Geller and four colleagues, and the company started looking to the future.

British writers deserve to be celebrated, he believes, and he is baffled by government policies that don’t seem to understand that.

“I go and speak at schools and

I tell the pupils that the creative industries bring in £92 billion to this country. And yet in so many schools they are cutting music and drama and art from the curriculum, and pushing tech and science.”

He’s on a mission to “demystify” publishing, and break down old perceptions that it is snobbish. Although he grew up in a comfortable, middleclass home in Cockfosters, north London, and went to a private school, City of London Boys, he still had a perception of the industry before he joined it as being “very closed — very English people having dinners in Tuscany together. I thought I’d never be part of that world.”

The need for more diversity is a current talking-point in the industry, and Geller says it is important not to just be “glib and liberal” about it, but find a way of attracting “new people and voices who represent our society and not just a section of it.”

It’s difficult to make the industry more diverse though, he says, because starting salaries of £20,000 effectively rule out those who can’t afford to live in the capital. He talks about bursaries and sponsorships… the need for government support, but seems startled when I suggest that Curtis Brown could move some of its operations out of London, seeking new talent and training new agents in Manchester or Newcastle. It would save money, he agrees. It might also provide more access to the agency’s creative writing courses (the first offered by

I never thought I’d be part of the literary world’