Dean Cooke (CookeMcDermid)

Literary agent Dean Cooke has died. He was 71.

Cooke, who was born in Rochester, New York, according to a death notice, moved to Canada to study at Carleton University when he was 17, and made his professional life here. He worked in publishing for more than 40 years, starting from a first job in the industry in 1979, when he was hired to ghostwrite a book about a Vietnamese refugee’s trip to Toronto for Virgo Press. After completing that job, Cooke was offered a job in the warehouse.

“I don’t know what that says about my writing skills, but I suspect it’s not flattering,” Cooke told Q&Q in 2008.

When Virgo Press went out of business in 1981, Cooke moved on to work in the marketing and editorial departments at Doubleday Canada, followed by a brief stint at Lester & Orpen Dennys before becoming publishers of Bantam Seal.

The recession of the early 1990s meant that publishers, including Bantam Seal, had stopped acquiring new titles. Cooke decided to pivot in the uncertain market to agenting with the purchase in 1992 of Peter Livingston Associates, which he renamed Livingston Cooke. More than 20 years later, he described that choice as a move of self-preservation.

“My decision to go into agenting was really based on my desire to know who was going to own the company when I got up in the morning,” he told Q&Q. “It wasn’t an easy time to sell books. But my instinct was that there inevitably had to be a moment where publishing houses would have to start buying books again. They’d slowed down to such degree that in a year or two, they were going to find that they didn’t have anything on their list, and that in fact proved to be true. Starting as an agent then, it wasn’t long before I found myself able to sell fairly well.”

Cooke presided over the agency’s many iterations, from Livingston Cooke to the Cooke Agency to Cooke Agency International, merging with The Harding Agency in 2007, until the agency amalgamated in 2017 with the McDermid Agency (co-owned by Martha Webb and Chris Bucci) to form CookeMcDermid.

In 2021, Cooke and Sally Harding sold their ownership stake in the agency to Suzanne Brandreth and Ron Eckel, who became co-proprietors of CookeMcDermid alongside Martha Webb. In a note on Cooke’s death, the three wrote that Cooke remained a trusted advisor even after selling his stake in the business.

“He lived the adage that publishing is a business of relationships, and he nurtured them,” they wrote. “We will miss his wit and keen intelligence, his personal grace and sartorial elegance, his mean martinis and his infectious laugh. He was a singular, wonderful man, and we are grateful for his time with us.”

As an agent, Cooke represented many award-winning and bestselling authors over his career, including John Irving, Robert Munsch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Anna Olson.

“My longest novel, The Last Chairlift, is dedicated to Dean, but this doesn’t express the extent of my dedication to him,” Irving wrote in a statement. “Dean was more than my literary agent, and a first reader of my novels in manuscript. He’s been my best friend in Canada for 40 years. I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life.”

Cooke was recognized for his contributions to the Canadian publishing industry in 2014 when he was named the Ivy Award recipient. In addition to his work as an agent, he lectured as an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and other venues across North America.

Cooke died on April 14 in Palm Springs, California, after a brief illness.