For Scribe UK, it was a tremendous year, 2015, the first year in which we published UK-based authors. It saw net revenues exceed £750,000, two of our books make it to the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller lists, several prize shortlistings, a Waterstones Book of the Month and an Amazon Book of the Year, and extensive media coverage for our books, with the brilliance of Publicity and Operations Manager Sarah Braybrooke recognized by The Bookseller’s Rising Star accolade, and, at its close, our elevation to the illustrious high table of the Independent Alliance. And in consequence we are pleased to announce that Philip Gwyn Jones is to increase his involvement with the imprint and becomes Publisher-at-Large, while the immensely talented Molly Slight becomes Publishing Executive for the list, both with immediate effect. Henry Rosenbloom, Founder & Publisher of Scribe Publications, says: ‘I'm thrilled with our rapid progress in the UK, the inspiring work of our staff and Faber’s sales team, and the warm reception of the UK media and book trade.'
We are also pleased to announce our first three acquisitions of the new year:
First, we will publish Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by Kim Barker as a B-PB original in April to coincide with the nationwide release of the Paramount film starring Tina Fey, Martin Freeman and Margot Robbie. It’s a wittily self-deprecating account of the life of a rather wayward war correspondent lost amidst the warlords, imams, drugdealers, soldiers, spooks and partying journalists in Taliban-infested Afghanistan.
Second, we have acquired rights in a novel by Dorothy Project founder Danielle Dutton, which we will publish in December as a small and stylish hardback. It’s entitled Margart the First, and fictionalizes the story of the remarkable Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who lived through Civil War and Restoration in England, burned with ideas, and burst out of the strictures then in place upon women. Her allegorical-fantastical work The Blazing World was published alongside her philosophical observations and brought her notoriety and into debate with Hobbes, Boyle and other (male) luminaries of the time, and her views on gender and science were inflammatory. She was the first woman to be invited to speak at the Royal Society, and the last for 200 years. Her ambition and her intellect and her torments and her tenderness are brought vividly to life in Dutton’s dancingly deft re-invention of an astonishing and pioneering woman – perhaps the first to write deliberately for publication in English, and the first English ‘she-philosopher’, who for her pains was blighted by the nickname Mad Madge, and mocked by the likes of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. Rights were acquired from Cynthia Cannell Agency. Catapult is publishing in the US.
Third, we have acquired rights in Mexican novelist Emiliano Monge’s Las Tierras Arrasadas from the Casanovas Lynch Agency. It is a blackly comic account of a swashbuckling, amoral couple who run a small-time people trafficking business across the Mexico-USA border. The pair have something of the magnetic, complex villainy of The Sisters Brothers of Patrick deWitt about them, and inhabit a brutal, violent, perilous world. The award-winning translator Frank Wynne will translate for us, and he has said that he has never read a voice like Monge’s in Spanish before. Monge was one of the writers showcased in the Mexico20 group at last year’s LBF, and he has been compared by the TLS to Roberto Bolaño and Tom McCarthy. Of this novel, PEN-award winning campaigner Lydia Cacho has said: “I am sure that there is no other text that honours the voices of the migrants as much as this novel does. A writing that confronts. Poetry in the carrion.”
We’re excited to add these three cracking titles to our list, and are looking forward to a bumper 2016.