Pat Kavanagh (agent)

Patricia Olive "Pat" Kavanagh (31 January 1940, Durban, South Africa – 20 October 2008, London, England) was a British literary agent.

Kavanagh was born in 1940 in Durban, South Africa, where her father was a journalist before and after his service as a fighter pilot in the SAAF during the Second World War. Her mother, Olive (née Le Roux), was a pioneering public health inspector. Her half-sister, Julie Kavanagh, is a ballet critic. Her half-brother, Michael O'Brien, is a geologist living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

She attended the University of Cape Town, but pursued an interest in acting. She had an uncredited, non-speaking role in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood after coming to Britain in 1964. She did not get paid for the part, but, as she later recalled, she did "get to Richard Burton". It marked the end of her acting career. While working for J. Walter Thompson as a copywriter, she answered an advertisement for a position as a literary agent. She was hired by "legendary agent" A. D. Peters who taught her how to negotiate and gave her responsibility for selling serialization and newspaper rights for the agency's early group of clients, including Arthur Koestler, S. J. Perelman, Rebecca West and Tom Wolfe.

She was married to, and was the literary agent of, the writer Julian Barnes. They lived in North London. In the 1980s, Kavanagh left Barnes for a relationship with author Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but later returned to the marriage. Winterson is said to have used the relationship as the basis of her novel The Passion (1987).

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