Felicity Bryan

Literary agent

FELICITY BRYAN, who has died at 74, was an international journalist and literary agent who co-founded The Washington Post’s Laurence Stern Fellowship for promising British interns – a programme that is now being renamed in her honour.

Born in Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, she was the second of three daughters of Betty and Paul Bryan. Her father was a war hero who served from 1955 to 1987 as Conservative MP for the East Riding constituency of Boothferry.

Educated at Benenden School in Kent, she studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London before joining The Financial Times in Washington and then The Economist in London, where she wrote the American Survey.

In 1973, she joined the literary agency Curtis Brown in London, and remained there for 15 years, representing Karen Armstrong, Matt Ridley, Diarmaid MacCulloch and John Julius

Norwich, amongst other authors. In 2010 she led a management buyout of the agency.

In the meantime, she had joined fellow journalist Godfrey Hodgson and the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in founding the Stern fellowship in memory of her friend, Larry Stern, who died in 1979, aged 50. Past winners have included the journalists and broadcasters James Naughtie, Lionel Barber, Mary Ann

Sieghart, Cathy Newman and Gary Younge.

She was appointed MBE in last January’s New Year Honours List for services to publishing.

Her first marriage ended in divorce and she is survived by her second husband, the economist Alex Duncan, whom she married in 1981, and by two sons.

Her daughter, Alice, who inherited her grandmother’s bipolar disorder, died at 22.