In his perpetual quest to find new authors Esmond Harmsworth often read at least one full-length book a week and the first 20 pages of another ten. In most cases he was quick to decide on the work’s merits. “Sometimes it’s from the very first paragraph, and then I start to think that I absolutely have to represent this — this is fantastic,” he told CBS News in the United States. Nevertheless, he readily admitted that literary agents can be flawed gatekeepers. “So much depends on what we can spot and what we like,” he added.
Harmsworth, a scion of the Rothermere newspaper family, was well known in American literary circles. He was a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth (ZSH) literary agency, which in 2016 merged with Kuhn Projects to form Aevitas Creative, one of the world’s largest literary agencies, of which he was president.
He represented authors of non-fiction books on topics such as politics, psychology and business, as well as literary fiction, mystery and crime and historical novels. They included Keith McFarland, author of The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers (2008); Amanda Ripley, who wrote The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (2013); and Michelle Hoover, author of the First World War novel Bottomland (2016).
Harmsworth found some of his clients from newspaper or magazine articles that struck him as “exceptionally well written and exploring a new subject”. One was Stacy Sullivan, who covered the Balkan conflict for Newsweek and later published Be Not Afraid For You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the US into the Kosovo War (2004). He pursued her by telephone until she agreed to let him represent her, telling the Columbia Journalism Review that although Sullivan had an idea of what her book would be about, they spent hours discussing “how much she would include, where she would start, where she would finish, what the narrative structure would be”.
Like many agents, Harmsworth had a wealth of advice for authors seeking representation, including “avoid spelling and grammar errors and long, boring letters”. It was also good to avoid “cute things”, he said. “People come to the office wearing costumes” or “submit work on heart-shaped paper” sometimes using bizarre fonts. “If you are looking to catch [an agent’s] eye, do it with the best writing possible and leave the stationery and chicken suit at home.”
Esmond Vyvyan Harmsworth was born at Warwick House, London, in 1967. He was the son of Esmond Cecil Harmsworth, the 2nd Viscount Rothermere, an MP and chairman of the Daily Mail, and his third wife Mary (née Murchison), a philanthropist and socialite (Rothermere’s second wife, Ann, with whom he had no children, later married Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond).
Harmsworth had fond memories of his childhood at Daylesford House in Gloucestershire, where, under new ownership, Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds celebrated their nuptials in 2022. He attributed his love of books to his parents imposing a television ban until he was six and requiring him to read. Once it lifted, he overdosed on TV, but his early exposure to books left him with a lifelong love of the written word. “Parents need to encourage children to read. Give them time to discover books,” he told an American newspaper in 2004.
He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Eton College. Diana Oehrli, a journalist and friend, described in her blog meeting him in Monte Carlo “dressed in full tails, fresh off a plane from Eton, driven by your mother’s chauffeur straight to our hotel, where your mother had rented five rooms and turned them into her apartment”.
After his father’s death in 1978, mother and son settled in the US. By the early 1980s he was spending summers in Newport, Rhode Island, a popular destination for wealthy families. “I remember when I was a teenager gatecrashing the most fabulous and frivolous parties,” he told Town & Country magazine, adding: “There is a wonderful joie de vivre and a focus on entertaining and parties in the summer, but there is also this community of historians and experts.” In later years he organised fun-filled summer fêtes there, where he was known for his daring high kicks on the dancefloor.
While reading history and art history at Brown University, in Rhode Island, he was involved in LGBTQ activism. He continued his studies at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1995. Two years later he co-founded ZSH, based in Boston, Massachusetts.
He regularly spoke at writers’ conferences and for more than 20 years sponsored the Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters held at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. The series has featured some of America’s leading novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics including Deborah Treisman (2019) and Michael Chabon (2023).
Away from work, Harmsworth travelled widely, backpacking through India, diving in Hawaii, skiing in the Alps, hiking glaciers in Iceland, rappelling canyons in the Azores and enjoying the company of family and friends throughout Europe, north Africa, the Far East and the Caribbean. He was a champion duplicate bridge player, seeking partners for the game among the grand ladies of Newport and pursuing tournament opportunities at care homes and community centres.
Harmsworth is survived by his French husband, Jérôme Buet, who works in marketing, and by their two young children, Alfred and Liliane. The couple were donors to Glad Law, which provides legal support to gay, lesbian and transsexual Americans, and to other organisations involved in championing equal marriage. He was also a benefactor of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and GrubStreet, a Boston-based nonprofit organisation founded “to ensure writers of all backgrounds have what they need to develop their voices and share their stories”.
Each summer he challenged himself to increasingly long open-water swims, culminating in August with a solo swim along the length of Newport’s Cliff Walk. He planned the seating for every dinner party, sometimes based on careful curation but just as often with random arrangements such as alphabetical order by brand of underwear.
Harmsworth, who had recently moved to London with his family, continued to read voraciously for work and pleasure. His tastes ranged from science fiction, magical realism and surrealism to non-fiction and “poor-little-rich-girl” biographies. “The main reason people work in book publishing is because they like to read,” he explained.
However, he lamented the increasing gulf between professional writers who produce well-crafted work and those who seldom punctuate their emails, if they write at all. “There’s a correlation between the ability to write well and success in college,” he said. “Writing is a key skill. Unfortunately, it’s being neglected in school. People see it as an amorphous skill that is hard to quantify. They’d rather give students a maths test.”
Esmond Harmsworth, literary agent, was born on June 18, 1967. He died from heart failure while on holiday in Mauritius on April 9, 2025, aged 57
