Scribe UK is immensely pleased to announce a triple helping of repeat contracts, with three of its existing authors, whose literary careers we are proud to continue to nurture.
Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause disassembled middle age in our times, and was hailed as 'Lucid and sophisticated … A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over’ by The Guardian. Her new work of memoiristic-essayistic nonfiction is a similarly astute, elegant and engaging examination of insomnia. Marina Benjamin has produced an unsettling account of an unsettling condition, that treats insomnia not as a disorder in need of a cure, but an existential experience that can illuminate how we think about ourselves, about creativity and about love. Insomnia is a bravura piece of writing, both philosophical and poetic. It promises to take a fresh look at what it means to be wakeful in the dark. Philip Gwyn Jones acquired rights from Rebecca Carter of Janklow & Nesbit, who retains control of audio and US rights. Scribe will publish in flapped paperback in the autumn of 2018.
Jeremy Gavron is the author of the universally acclaimed memoir about his search for his mother A Woman on the Edge of Time, about which Ali Smith wrote "I was mesmerised by Jeremy Gavron’s extraordinary memoir… It’s one of those works that cross over into the real life so justly that all of life is better understood by it, and what books can do with lives – and vice versa, what lives can do with books” and he has now written an equally searching, moving and illuminating novel about loss and absence, Felix Culpa, that is composed almost entirely of sentences and phrases taken from Jeremy’s hundred favourite books. Despite such deliberate origins, Gavron's story of a lost boy springs forward with ever more emotional and narrative power as it proceeds. Philip Gwyn Jones acquired rights from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander, who retains control of translation, US and audio rights in the book. Scribe will publish in hardback in February 2018.
Tommy Wieringa is one of the Dutch language’s greatest living exponents, and his fiction is steadily amassing for him a stellar worldwide reputation. Most recently, Scribe published his perfect novella A Beautiful Young Wife, the equal of anything of similar length by Ian McEwan. Mariella Frostrup said it is ‘a painful, razor-sharp portrait of what it is to be an ageing man … Beautiful, concise, taut.’ Wieringa’s new novella is an equally taut and ethically unnerving portrait of the aftermath of the death of an illegal migrant in the boot of a car on board a Mediterranean ferry, The Death of Murat Idrissi. Scribe has acquired rights in that book and Wieringa’s next unpublished full-length novel, with the novella being published in hardback in August 2018. Sam Garrett, Wieringa’s brilliant long-time translator, will again render Tommy’s prose in crystalline English. Philip Gwyn Jones acquired rights from Marijke Nagtegaal at De Bezige Bij of Amsterdam, who retains translation and US rights.
