Ray-Güde Mertin, Literary Agent and Editor, Dies at 63

by María E. Cruz -- Críticas, 1/15/2007

Literary agent Ray-Güde Mertin, Ph.D., head of the renowned German literary agency that carries her name, died last Saturday in Frankfurt. Mertin played an important role in the promotion of Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese literature worldwide and in Germany. Dr. Ray-Güde Mertin Literary Agency currently represents authors such as Nobel laureate José Saramago, Luis Sepúlveda, Xavier Velasco, Gonzalo Celorio, and Claudia Piñeiro, among many others. Mertin died after a long struggle with cancer.

Born in 1943 in Marburg, Germany, Mertin realized she wanted to specialize in Brazilian Literature while teaching German Literature at Brazilian universities. She worked as an independent translator for German agencies in New York in 1977 and the next year she concluded her doctorate degree with a dissertation on Brazilian playwrite and poet Joaõ Guimarães Rosa. She returned to Germany in 1982 and founded her literary agency. Mertin regularly attended book fairs around the globe, including Frankfurt, London, Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, and Rio de Janeiro. In 2000, the Brazilian government awarded her with the Ordem de Mérito Cultural (Order of Cultural Merit) for her promotion of Brazilian literature abroad. In 2005, the Women in Publishing Network, of which she co-founded the Frankfurt chapter, named her Woman in Publishing of the Year.

In an obituary published this week in the Spanish newspaper El Comercio, Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda said of his literary agent and close friend, “ [Mertin] was more than a literary agent, she was a voracious reader, tenderly critical, and only represented those writer with whom she shared an ethical and esthetical affinity, deeply literary....She is gone now, she will be gone always, and Ray-Güde Mertin’s absence leaves us—aside from sad—at a loss.”