Eloghosa Osunde’s publishers, Fourth Estate, has won a four-publisher auction for Eloghosa’s debut novel, Vagabonds.
According to a report by The Bookseller , Kishani Widyaratna who is the editorial director, acquired British Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada and Nigeria) in physical, e-book and audio from Alba Ziegler-Bailey at the Wylie Agency.
Eloghosa’s novel will be published in hardback in spring of 2022, in a coordinated campaign with Riverhead Books in the US.
Here is a synopsis from the publishers:
“Vagabonds! is a tumultuous and unexpectedly joyous novel of oppression and defiance among the people and spirits of Lagos. This work remaps the city by taking us deep into the hearts, minds and bodies of its inhabitants, with the voices of Èkó (the Yoruba name for Lagos), and his loyal minion named Tatafo (meaning ‘gossip’) as our guides. They weave trouble through the city’s streets and throughout the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the displaced, the queer, women and children. Vagabonds are those who inhabit transient spaces, who move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances, and alternative realities. In this world, girls and women slip in and out of their bodies and their skins, men lose their heads and their souls; they draw in the city’s chaotic, dark energy and breathe it back out again, creating new ways of living in the process.”
Speaking with The Bookseller, Widyaratna said: “I have not read a debut novel as fearless or as original as Vagabonds!…It is a rare novel which deftly executes a thrilling high-wire act of being dazzling, brutal, innovative, and deeply moving all in one.”
Eloghosa said that she “couldn’t be more thrilled to be publishing with both Riverhead and Fourth Estate next year. This book means so much to me, so I’m thankful for the opportunity to have these stories meet readers near and far, and I look forward to the road ahead!”
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and visual artist. She is an alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop, and the filmmaking and screenwriting programs at New York Film Academy. In 2017 her short story was longlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize. She has works published in Catapult, Guernica, Berlin Quarterly and The Paris Review (where she is a columnist). Her work is forthcoming in The Georgia Review and Gulf Coast.
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