Scribe to publish former ABC journalist’s account of fatal police-shooting of mentally ill man

Scribe has acquired world rights to former ABC journalist Kate Wild’s narrative nonfiction account of the fatal police-shooting of a mentally ill man, 24-year-old Elijah Holcombe, in NSW in 2009.

Scribe publisher Henry Rosenbloom said Waiting for Elijah will be Scribe’s ‘biggest book of 2018’, and ‘is one of the most important acquisitions in our history’. ‘It is always thrilling to come across writing of this calibre, and I have every confidence that this book will herald the arrival of a significant new nonfiction talent in Australia,’ said Rosenbloom.

The publisher said the book is ‘an account of a tragedy that didn’t have to happen’, and ‘an intense and forensic deconstruction of the ensuing legal proceedings and a portrait of a family’s grief.

‘Like the best of its genre, in the vein of Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and the work of Helen Garner, one specific case becomes a lens through which broader questions are focused: Why is there still so much stigma surrounding mental illness in a country in which one in five adults each year will experience some kind of mental-health problem? How can interactions between the mentally ill and police be improved?’ said the publisher.

Waiting for Elijah will be published in June 2018.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions