Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has seized 10 books by Helen Garner in a competitive five-way auction.
Lettice Franklin, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding ANZ and Canada, from Sarah Lutyens at Lutyens and Rubinstein, on behalf of Michael Heyward at Text Publishing. Lisa Lucas, senior vice-president of Knopf and publisher of Pantheon, acquired North American rights to seven books.
The 10 titles acquired by W&N include four works of fiction: Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo, Cosmolino and Honour and Other People’s Children; one work of non-fiction: This House of Grief; Garner’s three volumes of diaries: Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This and How to End a Story; alongside, Stories, Garner’s collected short fiction and True Stories, her collected short non-fiction.
This House of Grief, The Children’s Bach and Monkey Grip will be published on the W&N Essentials list on 29th February 2024.
This will be followed by a hardback publication of Garner’s diaries, collected into one volume for the first time, and further paperback publication of the remaining titles on the W&N Essentials list in 2025.
These publications will mark the first time many of the Australian writers’ titles have ever been published in the UK. She was the inaugural recipient of the Melbourne Prize for Literature and has won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-Fiction and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Last month, she was awarded the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal, awarded biennially to celebrate an outstanding contribution to Australian culture.
This House of Grief is described as “a true crime classic, about a father suspected of murdering his three sons and the ensuing trial that gripped a nation”, while Monkey Grip tells the story of a young single mother’s doomed love affair set in the communal households of late-1970s Melbourne.
Franklin said: “I still cannot quite believe that I will be publishing Helen Garner at W&N. Helen is regularly compared to Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore but – though her books more than stand up to those comparisons – I think she is a writer without parallel. There are so many things to admire: her unwavering scrutiny of the world, her compassion and empathy for what she sees, her crystal-clear prose, her extraordinary range and ability to write perfect novels and perfect nonfiction, and, on top of that, truly the best diaries ever.”
Garner added: “Not in my wildest dreams did I see this coming. I’m beyond delighted, and full of anticipation and curiosity.”