S&S to launch Scribner Australia imprint; acquires literary novel by Olsson

Simon & Schuster Australia will launch the literary imprint Scribner in Australia and New Zealand in 2018 with a new novel by Kristina Olsson.

Shell is ‘a sweeping literary novel set in 1960s Sydney against the backdrop of the building of Sydney Opera House and the Vietnam War’ from the author of the award-winning Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (UQP), among other nonfiction and fiction titles.

‘We have been waiting for exactly the right book to launch Scribner in Australia and I couldn’t be happier it’s Shell, a novel so special and exquisitely written, it feels like a dream it is ours to publish,’ said managing director Dan Ruffino. Publisher director Fiona Henderson described it as ‘quite simply, a masterpiece’.

S&S Australia acquired world rights to the novel from literary agent Jane Novak and has since signed two rights deals with Scribner in the UK and Atria in the US.

Suzanne Baboneau, managing director of adult publishing at Simon & Schuster UK, said of the acquisition: ‘Shell is a beautifully wrought, many-layered novel that transcends time and place, and I haven’t read anything quite like it since Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.’

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions