Before opening the Grosvenor Literary Agency in 1996, Deborah Grosvenor worked in the book publishing industry for sixteen years, both as an editor and selling foreign and subsidiary rights.
As an editor, she acquired and edited several hundred nonfiction books, although her best-known acquisition was a first work of fiction, The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, when she was director of book acquisitions and subsidiary rights at the Naval Institute Press.
Deborah also signed up best-selling author Homer Hickham’s first work, Torpedo Junction, and helped launch best-selling author’s Stephen Coonts’s first novel, Flight of the Intruder.
In 1989, Deborah was awarded the TWIN award (Tribute to Women in Industry), an award given by the YWCA and industry to "outstanding women who have made significant contributions to their companies in managerial and executive positions."
Grosvenor has a stable of about 60 authors. She handles commercial and literary fiction and nonfiction, with an emphasis on history, memoirs, biography, politics, natural history, popular culture and style, business, and science. in 2007 she merged her agency with that of Kneerim and Williams and is now a director in that company heading up their Washington, DC offices.
Deborah is a graduate of the University of Virginia, with a BA, cum laude, in English literature. She attended the International Book Rights Fair in Frankfurt, Germany, for a decade and has traveled extensively throughout Europe for foreign and subsidiary rights sales. She is fluent in Italian and an active member of the National Press Club.
