The Lavin Agency
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The Lavin Agency is a North American speakers bureau with offices in Boston, Toronto and Vancouver. Founded by David Lavin as a one-man office in the late 1980s, it has grown to employ more than two-dozen people, and serves customers across the United States, Canada, and around the world.
The Lavin Agency works with leading speakers in the fields of business, politics, culture, sports, religion, science, and education. The agency books these speakers for corporate and association clients, college and university lecture programmers, and public lecture series. The agency acts as the exclusive agency for many speakers, and also works with a number of well-established non-exclusives.
[edit] Some of The Lavin Agency’s Exclusive Speakers include:
- Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses
- Isabel Allende, author of The House of Spirits and Eva Luna
- Jared Diamond, scientist, and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse
- Billy Beane, general manager of The Oakland Athletics and the subject of Moneyball
- Lyn Heward, former president of creative content at Cirque du Soleil
- Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet
- Margaret Atwood, author, and recipient of the Booker Prize and the Giller Prize
- Rick Mercer, Canadian television star and host of The Rick Mercer Report
- Peter Mansbridge, anchor of The National on CBC
[edit] Early History
David Lavin was once the youngest chess master in Canada and represented the country in two World Under-27 Chess Olympics. Prior to forming The Lavin Agency, he was a promoter in Toronto who brought authors and other notable public figures to the city to lecture and debate the topics of the day. These speakers—many of whom were making their first visits to Canada—included economist John Kenneth Galbraith, social activist Abbie Hoffman, civil rights leader Eldridge Cleaver, and journalists such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer, who are often referred to as belonging to the school of New Journalism. In 1989, David Lavin started The Lavin Agency (then known as David Lavin Associates), with the goal of bringing ideas out into the open and stimulating debate. Great speakers, like great educators, he reasoned, have the ability to transform how people see their world -- how they think and how they act -- whether the subject was business, politics, or mass media.
