Gwenda David

Katya Gwenda Zeidman, publisher's consultant and translator: born London 2 April 1905; married 1934 Eric Mosbacher (died 1998; one son, one daughter); died London 20 March 2002.

Gwenda David gave unstintingly to literature during a sparkling career as a scout, reader, translator, and consultant to publishers. For the writers whose cause she championed she was a discreet yet zestful friend, indispensable adviser and canny entrepreneur, and her work was critical in bringing many important and popular books into the light of day.

She was born Gwenda Zeidman in 1905, the youngest but one of 11 children in an East End business family. She evidently rejected her family early on, and perhaps they did her: she never spoke of them; her skill in shifting conversation away from her personal history included a dramatic mystification about her youth that was part of the self-created character which intrigued and charmed her friends and associates.

Like many who make their lives in literature, she circled around books and writers long before she was paid to do it. She took a degree in journalism at King's College, London, then started another course at University College; she learned languages and traveled abroad: a persistent rumour had it that she marched in a May Day Parade in Moscow in the 1920s, but this could not be verified.

By 1934 she had met and married the translator Eric Mosbacher; she introduced him to the Italian anti-Fascist Ignazio Silone, and together they translated his novels Fontamara (1934) and Bread and Wine (1936), as well as his pseudonymous The School for Dictators (1939). Other books they translated together include Otto Strasser's Hitler and I (1940) and Siegfried Kracauer's Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937).

In 1937 her connections with interesting European and English writers made her a logical choice when Harold Guinzburg and B.W. Huebsch of the Viking Press, in New York, needed a London representative and scout; their association lasted for 50 years. But during the Second World War she suspended her Viking work to work for the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park; she was the first woman sub-editor assigned to translate and evaluate enemy broadcasts; her lifelong friendships with William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson date from this period.

After the war, she also read for the London literary agency Curtis Brown and for several British publishers; Harold Guinzburg's son Thomas, who succeeded him as president of Viking, recalled with grateful wonder her ability to do this possibly competing work with complete impartiality and fairness to all parties. Then, at an age when most people would be reducing their workloads, she added, in 1968-88, the Book of the Month Club in New York to the list of her prestigious, influential clients.

In the half-century she represented Viking in London she helped to make its roster of English writers possibly the most distinguished in America, and this was the centre of her working life. She brought to Viking the work of her friends Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, Muriel Spark, William Trevor, and many others, while other writers already published there – Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Rumer Godden and Rebecca West – soon became her friends too.

Her twice- or thrice-weekly air letters to Viking's editor in chief became legendary in New York for their witty, shrewd evaluations of everything that was going on in literary London. Her discernment about the manuscripts was larded with comprehensive, indiscreet, and largely reliable gossip about the people who had given them to her. In a time before faxes and e-mail, when expensive transatlantic travel and telephoning were not as common as now, Gwenda David's blue air letters were literally priceless.

She read everything, usually sooner than anyone else, often clandestinely and under the table, because writers, publishers, and agents trusted her before they trusted other readers, and she responded with uncanny swiftness to their need for early opinions. Dressed in her eccentric, stylish, brightly coloured clothes she would sally forth to her lunches, teas, drinks (always whisky, never sherry) and dinners with these people, eliciting from them a torrent of information about not only themselves and their work but everyone else's too: she had an amazing gift for encouraging confidences, in both senses of the word.

While her tongue was sharp and her judgement keen, her kindness was also well-known, and her relish for the people who made books gave the publishing enterprise a personal, idiosyncratic colour which it has now almost wholly lost. Her own taste was for the daring and original, for the unusual outlook, the unlikely accomplishment. So experienced and refined a reader had a quick eye for prose that was derivative, weak, sentimental, or pretentious: "Not For Viking," she would scrawl fiercely across such scripts, which included some of the best-known books in post-war English literature. Yet her enthusiasm for books was large, and she could find merit in every kind of material, popular or highbrow, political or literary, obscure or easily accessible.

An intensely private person, she was faultlessly hospitable at her minute house in Hampstead, when that was deemed in order, in which case her husband would come downstairs from his study, and the tiny living room where she did her reading – crowded with manuscripts and proofs piled by the big chairs and sagging sofa, with whisky and glasses set out at the ready on the desk by the phone – would fill up with aspiring wordsmiths, fatigued editors, literary celebrities and agents on the make.

An informal buffet supper for a visiting Viking editor in the 1980s – such evenings happened several times a year – was typical: William Trevor, Bruce Chatwin, Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, Alice Thomas Ellis, Alan Judd, Richard Holmes, Caroline Blackwood, their publishers and agents and friends and spouses, and those who wished they were, all crowded in to Trellis Cottage to see Eric and Gwenda; she liked to mix literary grandees with unknowns whose work she was encouraging; besides, many of the latter amused her more than the celebrities she had known for so long. But after such social exuberance there were the important inner moments – long walks on Hampstead Heath, long weekends of riding in the country, long quiet mornings of reading.

She continued her work well into her eighties, but after the death of her husband in 1998 and with increasing frailty she had to slow down. Still, the merry conspiratorial conversations and the shining passion for literature were undimmed to the end.

Elisabeth Sifton