Rosemary Canter, children’s book agent and co-founder of United Agents, died on March 11. Highly respected and admired by publishers, her fellow agents, critics and booksellers and loved by her authors and illustrators, Canter was proud of her authors and illustrators while remaining modest and private about her very considerable achievements.

Canter began working at Penguin in 1972. She remained in publishing as both an adult and a children’s editor at Macmillan and then Methuen. In 1989 she was asked to develop a children’s list for Fraser, Peters and Dunlop, where she remained until 2008 when, along with others, she set up United Agents. Canter’s clients included authors William Nicholson and Ros Asquith and illustrators Korky Paul and Simon Puttock.

As children’s authors achieved increasingly high profiles and commensurate advances, often especially on their debuts, Canter remained determinedly grounded about the nature of success. Although she launched a much-cherished Peters, Fraser and Dunlop prize for “the most promising writer for young people” on the Bath Spa Creative Writing course, she always warned writers against thinking there were any shortcuts to success or quick routes to fame.

Although she had been ill for some time, Canter still found time to give advice publically and privately while never losing her hunger for “the next project.” She once said of herself, “I am always, always looking for new talent. Finding it is one of the most seductive aspects of a fascinating job.” With that went always looking for the new opportunities for her talent, too. She was very supportive of the newly launched Nosy Crow company, which bought new series by both Lyn Garner and Adam Frost from her as well as a picture book by Simon Puttock. Nosy Crow’s Kate Wilson described Canter as “a robust negotiator, but not unreasonable: she'd been a publisher and understood publishing realities.”