David Miller was a Scottish novelist, editor, and literary agent of the UK agency Rogers Coleridge & White (RCW).
David Miller was born in Edinburgh. He was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, and at Girton College, Cambridge, where he read Theology.
At Cambridge, he was a co-founder of Misprint, the satirical magazine tinged with surrealist flourishes, which was produced with a low-tech, punkish flair.
After a short spell at a City recruitment consultancy, David Miller joined RCW in 1990 as Deborah Rogers' assistant. His first client was the Booker-shortlisted novelist Nicola Barker.
Over the following years, Miller worked his way up to become a highly respected agent and director of the company. He served as Treasurer of the Association of Authors’ Agents. In 2008, the publishing industry named him Literary Agent of the Year.
His short novel about Joseph Conrad, Today (2011), was praised by A. N Wilson as "not merely a story about Conrad and a tribute to Conrad. It is a Conradian achievement in itself. A wonderful piece of fiction."
David Miller edited an anthology of short stories, That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, published by Head of Zeus in 2014.
David Miller married the writer Kate Colquhoun in 1999; the marriage was dissolved in 2014 and he is survived by their two sons.
David Miller died in hospital in London aged 50.
The author Philip Hensher paid tribute to Miller, his first literary agent, as "the first person who took a chance on my writing", saying he was, "hilarious, wayward, incisive, exuberant, gossipy, full of plots and stratagems, clever, infuriating, passionate about books and good writing and.. my friend for a quarter of a century."
Hensher mourned: "The conversation we've been having about Conrad since 1992 is unfinished but over."
In his memory was named the DRF David Miller Internship Programme of the Deborah Rogers Foundation.
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