Latest acquisitions: Nonfiction

First Nations reportage, moving memoir, cooking, sport and Drag Queens Down Under—read all about Australian publishers’ recent nonfiction acquisitions.

S&S imprint Scribner Australia has acquired ANZ and UK rights to Kumanjayi: Death and Indifference by First Nations journalist Jack Latimore, in a deal via Melanie Ostell at Melanie Ostell Literary, for publication in the first half of 2025. Latimore said: ‘Kumanjayi tells the stories of the abuse, deaths, and indifference experienced by young Blackfullas in contact with police and the state.’

Upswell has acquired world rights to Jessica White’s collection Silence Is My Habitat: Ecobiological Essays, for publication in August 2025. Upswell publisher Terri-ann White said the book of essays ‘contains multiple dimensions’, with ‘a focus on deafness, [on] working in the archive, being an uninvited guest on Noongar boodjar while researching Georgiana Molloy (the subject of her next book), on one’s own energy and on slowing down, and on the death of her mother’.

Affirm Press has acquired world rights to Drag Queens Down Under, an anthology curated by Art Simone, for publication in November 2024. Affirm commercial publisher Kelly Doust said: ‘The queens in this collection are fabulous in every way, and we could not have a better editor than Art to showcase the best of Australian drag in all its myriad forms with her unique brand of wit, grit and style.’

Memoir

Hachette Australia has acquired ANZ rights to Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days for publication in late January 2025. Described by the publisher as a ‘heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace’, Memorial Days engages with the author’s experience of ‘immediate and many’ demands in the face of grief, ‘when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz—just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy—collapsed and died on a street in Washington, DC’. Hachette has aslo acquired world rights to The Voice Inside, a memoir by the singer John Farnham, for publication in November. Written in partnership with Poppy Stockell, director of 2023 Farnham biopic Finding the Voice, the book will chart Farnham’s ‘very personal and public journey … with his inimitable humour, insight, and humility’, according to the publisher. (more…)

Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)