Scribner Wins Joya
Scribner senior editor Colin Robinson beat out five other publishers in Canada and the U.S. for North American rights to Malalai Joya’s Raising My Voice via Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative Artists. Joya is a 30-year-old Afghan member of Parliament and vocal critic of the warlords in power—she’s currently suspended on the charge of “insulting the institution” and has survived repeated assassination attempts. She will tell her life story to raise awareness about human rights in Afghanistan. Derrick O’Keefe will co-write. The book caused a stir at the London Book Fair last month, and so far rights have been sold in Australia, France, Germany, Israel, Norway and the U.K. Pub date is 2009.
Tilting at Windmills
Henry Ferris at Morrow just won an auction for William Kamkwamba’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, to be written with Bryan Mealer, via Heather Schroder at ICM, who sold world rights. Kamkwamba, who is 20 and lives in Malawi, started going to the library at age 14, when his family could no longer afford to send him to school. His discovery of a book on wind energy gave him the idea to build a windmill to bring electricity to his home. One windmill led to another, until his family had radio, television and irrigation for their garden. Kamkwamba has more recently been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and is scheduled to speak at the World Economic Forum in the next few months.
Thomas Takes Three
Karen Thomas at Grand Central won an auction conducted by Victoria Sanders for three African-American novels by Kia Dupree. The first of the trio is Wife-in-Law. Dupree, who self-published her first novel, once interviewed to be Sanders’s assistant, then went on to work for Monique Patterson at St. Martin’s, a position she’s just left. Upon finishing this new book, Dupree asked Sanders to read it, and Sanders loved it—as, apparently, did Patterson, who was the underbidder in this auction.
Regal Double
Houghton Harcourt editor-in-chief Andrea Schulz acquired world rights to Alex Abella’s 90 Miles: How the Island of Cuba Remade the United States in a significant six-figure deal with Joe Regal. Abella, who came to the U.S. from Cuba at age 12, will focus on the years since the Spanish-American War in 1898 to tell the story of how Cuba has had more influence over American destiny than any other nation save England. Schulz also edited Abella’s first solo book of nonfiction, the just published Soldiers of Reason.
In another Regal deal, Michael Psaltis at the Culinary Cooperative/Regal sold North American rights to Colman Andrews’s Reinventing Food to BillShinker at Gotham. Andrews, cofounder of Saveur and now contributing editor at Gourmet, will follow El Bulli chef Ferran Adria for a year to show how Adria’s cooking has changed the way we eat and made Spain, not France, the epicenter of haute cuisine.
Big in YA
Tracy Farrell at Harlequin has acquired a new YA urban fantasy series by Gena Showalter that will launch the imprint’s forthcoming YA line in a seven-figure world rights deal with Deidre Knight. The first book is titled Intertwined and will be published in October 2009; no word on how many books in the deal.
Catherine Ryan Hyde made a new deal with Michelle Frey at Knopf for a novel, Diary of a Witness, via Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown. The book is about the friendship between two boys who endure casual cruelty because of their position in their high school’s social hierarchy until an accidental death outside of school changes the tenor of their response. Hyde is the author of 11 novels.
