We're looking for a Head of UK sales/Deputy sales director (maternity cover) based in our London office. Application deadline: Thursday. Colleagues: impeccable. Details: https://canongate.co.uk/about/jobs/
Suicide Blonde is a neon-lit portrait of danger and desire, unravelling and reinvention.
“Like so many naturals with a singular vision and an unyielding gift, Steinke wrote a perfect book nearly right out of the gate” Maggie Nelson
It's an exciting and extremely stylish publication day for us today.
There is Contrapposto: a captivating, humane new novel about creativity and friendship from the legendary Dave Eggers.
And the first ever set of Cult Canons: featuring novels for, by and about misfits, outsiders, drifters and deviants.
Join our cult!
All available now from your friendly local bookshop or online.
https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today
It's a heckuva publication day.
Matt Haig’s The Midnight Train is a story of love and second chance from the world of The Midnight Library. (The Midnight Library which as of right now has almost 900,000 five-star reviews on Goodreads: a true phenomenon of a book.)
At Sea is a thrilling and emotionally complex novel of impossible choices, gender and power politics – and the machismo of Big Oil. From award-winning writer Y.M. Abdel-Magied. (And it’s a Dua Lipa’s Service95 'MUST READ' for 2026!)
A rebellion ignites amongst a community of sex workers on an isolated island in Uprising by Tahmima Anan, a fiercely moving novel inspired by the real women of Banishanta, Bangladesh. (“A miracle” Salman Rushdie. “Captivating, gripped me from the first page” Elif Shafak.)
Homework is the inimitable Geoff Dyer’s recollection of his childhood and coming of age in postwar Britain. The Times says ‘if you've read Dyer before then you'll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven't, it's the perfect place to start.’
And Borderline Fiction is a staggering novel exploring masculinity, love and mental health, which was shortlised for the Dylan Thomas prize. From Derek Owusu, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023.
Huge congratulations and a happy publication day to all these great authors.
Happy publication day to these two wonders! Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran and The Future Is Peace by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon
Both available at your favourite local bookshop now, and online https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/out-today
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Nation of Strangers: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, this is a powerful and consoling reappraisal of the concept of exile, migration and home from internationally acclaimed author and political thinker Ece Temelkuran.
‘The most urgent and necessary book of our times’ Michael Morpurgo
‘Ece Temelkuran is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt’ Yanis Varoufakis
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The Future Is Peace follows two activists: one Palestinian, one Israeli, exploring their unique friendship and a life-changing journey across the holy land
‘Hopeful and inspirational, The Future is Peace is a walk through the land and history of Israel and Palestine that shows how two peace activists - an Israeli and a Palestinian - respect each other’s narratives and dare to dream magically of peace amidst the reality of conflict’ Simon Sebag-Montefiore
There is no shame at all in being targeted for these kind of scams or in wanting to believe them. They are sophisticated and cruel. The only shame belongs to the scammers. Please be wary and look out for yourselves.
There are things that an email approach might contain – like clearly personal, tailored enthusiasm for an author’s writing, making clear references to the particular details of a work… – that would have been too time consuming for the average scam in the past which AI has made trivial.
You can read one writer’s account of being targeted by this kind of scam at
https://stephaniewilliamswrites.substack.com/p/what-every-writer-dreams-of
It goes without saying that it is incredibly scummy behaviour to exploit people like this.
There’s a lot of emotional intensity bound up in people’s desire to see their work published, which makes them vulnerable to these sorts of scams.
A public service announcement for writers: please be very wary of scams. Canongate editors use email addresses from @canongate.co.uk and will not email you from other accounts.
We have heard several accounts recently of people who have been contacted by malicious actors claiming to be real Canongate editors. The scammers have expressed enthusiasm for the writer’s work and led them on with the ultimate goal of extracting money from them. This has even involved including other seemingly legitimate ‘people’ in email chains.
Double check any email purporting to be from a Canongate editor comes from @canongate.co.uk. If you are not 100% sure feel free to email info@canongate.co.uk and we can tell you if an editor has been in touch with you.
The same is true for approaches from other publishers: verify the domain. Double check with a known email address if necessary.
IF THIS BE MAGIC is a fascinating exploration of translation and Shakespeare from award-winning translator Daniel Hahn.
“A distillation of knowledge of a depth and breadth that makes you boggle anew at what one book can do” Guardian
We’re publishing so many great books today that this isn’t even the full lot (there’s also three other books by Margaret Drabble joining our Canons list)!
Happy publication day to them all!
Available in your friendly neighbourhood bookshop and online: https://bookshop.org/lists/out-today
A Whole Life – Robert Seethaler
The Last Movement – Robert Seethaler
The Café with No Name – Robert Seethaler
Foreign Fruit – Katie Goh
Nature's Genius – David Farrier
Food Fight – Stuart Gillespie
Lonely Crowds – Stephanie Wambugu
The Great Good Places – Margaret Drabble
If This Be Magic – Daniel Hahn
In the Oran Mor
Happy Gray Day to all that celebrate! (And all should celebrate.) Delighted to be in Glasgow for the 6th annual celebration of the work of writer and artist Alasdair Gray.
We publish today, for the first time, an unabridged audiobook of his debut and one of a good handful of masterpieces he can claim, the epic, mad miraculous Lanark.
Narrated by Alan Cumming, with contributions from Angus King and archive audio of Alasdair himself
Do my ideas include a stationery corner just so I can talk about nice notebooks I find and a little so that they can become business expenses? MAYBE
But that's obviously one more thing for the pile, essentially another social media maw to endlessly feed. Does it seem like it would be worth it? Would you sign up? Any thoughts on what platform we should or shouldn't use, or type of content it would be good to have.
I have a general, open-ended question I'd welcome feedback on. We’re an independent publisher, so we have limited resources (however talented and brilliant we might be) and social media has become complicated. People are spread out more broadly and nothing really has the same impact for us that Twitter did for us once upon a time. We're trying to stay on top of things, but one possible approach has come up of starting a Substack (or possibly Ghost) and doing more in the way of newsletter content. Writing articles, sharing extracts, making it a whole thing, like a fun and creative Canongate journal…
(oh, and happy new year all!)
I'm not sure how much this partnership with Google DeepMind clarifies that economic bounty. Bullet point 1 in the benefits is the entirely hypothetical benefits of nuclear fusion, on an assumption that AI-assisted research will get us there. Not very concrete.
Of course, it's also going to cut bureaucratic waste in government – as every governmental restructure ever announced always hopes to do – and it's being injected into the national curriculum in a way that I'm sure contains no potential downsides.