Nonfiction at Frankfurt
Australian publishers are heading to Frankfurt with plenty of nonfiction titles on offer, from poetic memoirs to vibrant art books. Below, they share highlights they look forward to pitching at the fair.
Life writing, politics and society
Nonfiction specialists Black Inc. bring to Frankfurt ‘the gripping story of Australia’s first female crime writer and her career-criminal son’ in Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George (Megan Brown & Lucy Sussex, February) under the publisher’s La Trobe University Press imprint. Says the publisher: ‘After a time selling sly-grog and a bigamous marriage to a policeman, Mary Fortune became a pioneering journalist and author’, producing The Detective’s Album, ‘the first book of detective stories to be published in Australia and the first by a woman to be published anywhere in the world’.
Black Inc. will also be presenting Upswell titles White Hibiscus (Loribelle Spirovski), a ‘memoir-in-a-poetic-tone by the acclaimed young artist … that tracks a childhood in The Philippines and Australia and a Covid-period encounter with the memory of it’, according to Upswell publisher Terri-ann White; and Calendar (Vanessa Berry), of which White says: ‘Calendar, with its daily accounts of a life surrounded by objects (hand-drawn) across 365 days, covers the full gamut from whimsical to moments and matters as serious as your life.’
Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America (Yves Rees, NewSouth) highlights ten unconventional Australian women who ‘headed across the Pacific to make their fortune’ and, in doing so, ‘reoriented Australia towards the United States, years before politicians began to lumber down the same path’, according to the publisher. ‘They were rebels, they were trailblazers, they were disruptors,’ says NewSouth. ‘Yves Rees’ tale of ten gutsy, globe-trotting women is a delight,’ adds NewSouth executive publisher Elspeth Menzies. ‘It turns what we thought we knew about early Australia–US relations on its head.’
From NLA Publishing, Dear Mutzi (Tess Scholfield-Peters) is the story of Harry Peters—formerly Hermann Pollnow, known to his family as Mutzi—who was born in Berlin in 1920. Says the publisher: ‘As a teenager, he fled Nazi Germany and landed in rural Australia. Harry’s parents, Edith and Max, never saw their son again. Edith perished at Theresienstadt; Max at Auschwitz-Birkenau.’ NLA adds that Scholfield-Peters has produced a debut that ‘skirts the edges of fiction and nonfiction’, as she weaves her research with her grandfather’s recollections ‘to envision the unknown’, telling his story with three intertwining threads: ‘a sketched-out history based on Harry’s testimony and documentary history; her engagement with this personal history from a third-generation perspective; and the present story of Harry’s growing infirmities and eventual death in early 2021 at age 100’. (more…)
Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)