Background
Gordon was born on May 23, 1940, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of Esmé Gordon, an architect and Honorary Secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy, and his wife Betsy.
42 Henderson Row, Edinburgh EH3 5BL, United Kingdom
Gordon was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, an independent day school. He acted in school productions, including Iolanthe, with future broadcaster Gordon Honeycombe, among others.
74 Lauriston Pl, Edinburgh EH3 9DF, United Kingdom
After school, where Gordon persistently failed examinations; he attended, for a time, Edinburgh College of Art, where his father lectured on architecture.
Gordon was born on May 23, 1940, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of Esmé Gordon, an architect and Honorary Secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy, and his wife Betsy.
Gordon was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, an independent day school. He acted in school productions, including Iolanthe, with future broadcaster Gordon Honeycombe, among others. After school, where he persistently failed examinations; he attended, for a time, Edinburgh College of Art, where his father lectured on architecture.
Gordon's lack of drawing skills led him to a trainee position at the publisher Oliver & Boyd in 1959. He remained as their employee for nearly four years. Following this, he moved to London in 1962 and was advertising manager for Secker & Warburg for a year, editor at Hutchinson in 1966, and then of the plays list at Penguin, where he launched the Penguin Modern Playwrights series. He became an editorial director at Gollancz in 1967 and stayed for five years, abolishing the uniform style in which the company's books had previously appeared. At this time he interviewed playwrights for the Transatlantic Review.
Having by the early 1970s published several books himself, including the poetry collections Two and Two Make One (1966), Twelve Poems for Callum (1970), and Between Appointments (1971), short story collections such as Pictures from an Exhibition (1970), and the experimental novels The Umbrella Man (1971) and About a Marriage (1972), Gordon possessed insights from both ends of the publishing business that would make him an effective literary agent. He joined Anthony Sheil Associates in 1972, which later became Sheil Land Associates in 1990, working with such talents as Peter Ackroyd, Sue Townsend, and members of the British royalty.
In 1995, Gordon left Sheil Land to work for Curtis Brown as both its director and literary agent. Though never as critically or popularly successful as the authors for whom he served as an agent, Gordon continued to write and edit books throughout his career. Some of his later books include the poetry collection The Oban Poems (1977), the novels Couple (1978) and Ambrose's Vision: Sketches towards the Creation of a Cathedral (1980), the co-authored nonfiction work Scotland from the Air (1995), and his tongue-in-cheek memoirs of his life in publishing, Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement? (1993). For his contributions to publishing, Gordon was honored by being named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1990.
Gordon married Margaret Eastoe in 1964; they had two sons and a daughter. His wife Margaret died of an incurable illness in 1989. Gordon's second marriage was to Maggie McKernan in 1990, with whom he had a son and two daughters. His daughter Hattie had, at the time of her father's death, published a memoir of her brother Gareth, who had committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 24.