UK and US deals for NZ novels
Three of the best New Zealand novels of recent years are about to be published in the UK and the US. All three books – She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall, Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly, and The New Animals by Pip Adam – have secured overseas deals.
Late last week UK publisher Hutchinson Heinemann announced it had acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for Greta and Valdin. Reilly's comic debut set in Auckland has been a knock-out success in New Zealand, loved and adored, pretty much a permanent fixture on the bestseller chart for the past year. It will be published in the UK in early 2024. The publisher told The Bookseller magazine, “Reilly’s exploration of love, family, queerness, migration, karaoke, the generational reverberations of colonialism and the disturbing realisation that your parents have a past will have readers falling in love with Greta and Valdin." US rights have been sold to Avid Reader Press.
In January, literary agent Martin Shaw sold US rights to Pip Adam's The New Animals, which won the Acorn prize for fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards. Anyone who read her most recent novel Nothing to See will declare her genius. Her new novel Audition – in the author's words, "In a spaceship powered by sound the giants sent from earth suffer the consequences of a rebellion of silence. They try to piece together what happened, to find themselves again as they enter a new world that sits over the lip of an event horizon" – will be published later this year.
Te Herenga Waka University Press were the first to discover and publish the Reilly and Adam novels – as well as Kirsten McDougall's ecothriller She's a Killer. The Shaw Agency has revealed that it will be published by Gallic Books in the UK. The publisher annouced, "She's a Killer is that rarest of books that has you both laughing out loud and burying your head in your hands in despair...Totally unputdownable." It’s a terrific book – the headline to Kiran Dass' rave review was "She's on fire" – which many assumed would make the shortlist for last year's Ockham New Zealand national book awards and had a very good chance, too, of winning the fiction prize. Bafflingly, it only got as far as the longlist. Oh well. To quote another ReadingRoom headline from last year: "To hell with the Ockhams". She's a Killer has been longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Prize and will be published as a hardback in the UK in October.
I conducted an email interview with Kirsten McDougall on Waitangi Day. How has this excellent development come about?
Gallic read the book and loved it. Then my agent sold it to them. Beyond that I don’t know how it happened! Is it a boost for you to keep writing?
Yes, and no. Yes, because if a publisher gets excited about your book and can envision readers for it in their market then you feel like you must be doing something right. No, because if I need overseas validation to keep writing, I would question my reasons for writing. Having said that, I’m not a writer who would keep writing even if no one anywhere wanted to publish my work. I want readers, and I want to entertain my readers. If no one wanted to publish me anymore, I’d retrain as a DJ, and build an audience of middle-aged women who still want to dance it out to deep house beats. I believe that’s quite a large audience. Gallic Books have this whole Francophile thing going on and also have an eclectic mix of a few Kiwi novels – by Chloe Lane, Fiona Kidman, Damien Wilkins. They also have a bookshop. Are they basically a boutique publisher?
Yes, they’re boutique. They started out translating French literature for English readerships and have expanded this to bring in other ‘fringe' dwellers that for reasons bizarre have not been picked up by larger publishers. I’m very lucky that they spotted me. Gallic also run very lovely bookshop in Belgravia, London. I visited it in December, when I was there visiting my family for Xmas. The fact that they have their own bookshop made me like them even more. I think if you’re a publisher, you need to stay in touch with what readers are after. One thing I admired about my old boss and my publisher in NZ, Fergus Barrowman, is that he is a rapacious reader and buyer of books from bookshops. He understands it’s part of the business to see what’s happening on the shop floor, what the mood is amongst sellers and buyers. It is a business after all. A business of dreams. How long had you lived with the novel before it was published?
I wrote the first scene with Alice and her mother back in 2017. This scene didn’t make it into the book but was hugely important for capturing a tone I was hearing. Then I took unpaid leave in 2019 and wrote 80,000 words in four months. That was insanely fast for me, but it was working so I just kept writing. It took most of 2020 to write the ending. Endings are really tough to get right. The book was published in NZ in October 2021. I’d say that’s a fairly quick genesis to publication process. For me at least.
We’ve just had the Ockham longlist. She's a Killer was widely regarded as a favourite to win last year’s fiction prize and many were baffled it didn’t make the shortlist. The Ockhams sort of marks the end or a new beginning for most NZ books; do you have any advice for fiction writers who have been disappointed at the Ockhams?
Prizes only matter if you win them.
I do think that there is an inordinate amount of attention put on prizes, and this is because publishers and sellers can use prize noms and wins as part of sales pitches in a saturated book market. And it is saturated. Look at the brilliant books that didn’t even make the longlist - Kōhine, Beats of the P’au, to name two of my favs from last year. If you are to keep writing and stay sane, you must keep your writing self separated out from the business end of writing. The publication of your book, the publicity you do, the events, the prize cycle — that is the business end of writing. It is public facing and my advice in this realm: stay professional and remember it’s all noise, and has very little to do with the personal and intimate act of writing and creating characters and story.
Literature is a hard game. It’s hard to write, it’s hard to get published. What keeps you going as a writer?
I love reading and I love the game of making stories. It’s a fire that burns hard in me. I get immense satisfaction from writing. Even when my writing sucks I know I’m in my element.
I have a jeweller friend who talks about the types of materials she likes to work with — primarily steel, copper and brass. She doesn’t use gold or precious stones. I think like that with words. I use the steel and copper and brass of language. They’re my materials and I love them and never tire of working with them.
Your good news comes at the same time as novels as Pip Adam and Rebecca K Reilly have also got overseas deals. You would have worked with both these authors in your long years working in publicity for the-then Victoria University Press; what do you recall of their two books, when they were being published? Did you think, for example, of The New Animals: “OMG genius”, and of Greta and Valdin: “Woah people are gonna love this”?
From the moment I first read Pip Adam I found her work incredibly exciting. I love that she doesn’t seem to care about flirting with the reader. I’m a writer who definitely flirts with the reader. Pip is too cool to do that. I want to be that cool but I never will be. I can’t wait to read her new novel this year.
With Rebecca’s book, it had such an ebullient nature and was an utter joy to read. So funny and fun, and loving.
However, I worked in publishing long enough to have no idea about what readers are going to love or not love. My husband, who’s been in the music industry for many years and was in bands with hit songs and produced hit songs has this saying — “No one knows what a hit looks like until it’s a hit.” It’s the truth. You can have a feeling about a book, but there’s so many ducks to line up in row to get it from a brilliant proposition to a best-seller and some of those ducks are out of your control. When they line up — as they are starting to do for Pip and Rebecca now, it’s gold! Golden ducks for all. She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall, Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and Nothing to See by Pip Adam were all published by Victoria University Press, and remain available in bookstores nationwide.
