Scribe UK is proud to announce that we have this summer commissioned three very different but equally fascinating forays into European nonfiction, from Dutch, Polish, and Swedish:
Made in Sweden: the 25 ideas that created a country by Elisabeth Åsbrink
At times in recent years it has seemed that Britain’s love-affair with all things Scandi would never end. We seem to believe the food, furnishings, fiction, fashion and general belief system of the Swedes and their neighbours to be more sophisticated, more admirable and more evolved than our own. We have all aspired to be Swedish. But have we invested all our faith in a fantasy Sweden? With her trademark elegance, intelligence and wit, Elisabeth Asbrink, author of 1947 (Scribe, 2017), demonstrates definitively in MADE IN SWEDEN that Sweden is far less homogenous, moderate, egalitarian, self-knowing or tolerant than it would like to (have us) think. Using two dozen of the most resonant words and concepts in the language, this book will give the world’s understanding of Swedish values a short, sharp corrective shock – as the Swedish electorate has just done this weekend past…
Philip Gwyn Jones acquired WEL rights from Magdalena Hedlund of the Hedlund Agency. Natur & Kultur published the Swedish edition last month, and Scribe will publish in English in the UK, ANZ and US in the autumn of 2019.
Ellis Island: a people's history by Małgorzata Szejnert
With doors slamming in the faces of immigrants to Trump’s America, it seems like the right moment to reconsider the long history of European migration to the USA, and its most iconic way-station, through which in its heyday from 1892 to 1924 more than 10 million immigrants arrived in search of the American Dream. It is equally important to consider that history from outside, from one of its principal sources indeed in this case — Poland. Sifting thousands of archival recordings and mountains of impounded correspondence of the experience of passing through Ellis Island and beyond (or being turned back from it), the great Polish reporter Małgorzata Szejnert has pieced together an entirely moving, entirely dramatic, multi-vocal account of the agony and ecstasy of arriving in the Land of the Free. Szejnert is perhaps Poland’s most famous living journalist, who only in her retirement from journalism has turned fully to the writing of books, having helped set up both the first dissident paper in the shipyards before Martial Law, and then Poland’s great post-Communism newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and spearheaded its world-famous school of reportage, producing great reporters such as Wojciech Tochman and Jacek Hugo-Bader. This is her first book to be translated into English, with the translation being done by American translator Sean Bye of the Cedilla collective.
Philip Gwyn Jones acquired WEL rights from Charlotte Seymour of Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Znak published the original Polish edition in 2009 and Scribe will publish in English in the US, UK and ANZ in the winter of 2020.
The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: a century of revolution in St Petersburg by Pieter Waterdrinker
And then there is the country with which the UK has done most wrestling this year. It remains to many the most mysterious, elusive, and yet fascinating nation of all: Russia. And it takes a Dutchman, of all people, to explain the Russian Century in all its messily contradictory strangeness, and in particular its cultural and psychological centre St Petersburg, where he has lived for the last 25 years. Waterdrinker’s novels have been translated into many languages. In English, he is best-known for his wonderfully acerbic novel about Dutch-German animosities and stereotypes, GERMAN WEDDING. Now Waterdrinker brings his ebullience and intelligence as a writer (and reader) of fiction to his first work of nonfiction with this spectacularly vivid, vivacious and voracious account of living on the edge of Europe, on St Petersburg's Tchaikovsky Street to be exact, and inside the Russian soul, at the epicentre of Russia’s revolutionary past, for 25 years. He reveals what that does to a non-Russian mind and soul…
Philip Gwyn Jones acquired WEL rights from Rebecca Carter of Janklow & Nesbit UK acting on behalf of Nijgh & van Ditmar Publishers, who published the original Dutch edition earlier this year. Scribe will publish in English in the UK and ANZ in 2020.