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BEN BALL ACQUIRES A BOOK ON THE FIGHT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS BY ELAINE PEARSON

 
Scribner Australia is delighted to announce the acquisition of world rights to Elaine Pearson’s new work of non-fiction, Chasing Wrongs and Rights. This book was acquired by Scribner Australia’s Publishing Director, Ben Ball.
Elaine Pearson is the extremely accomplished Australia director of Human Rights Watch. She established the global organization’s Australia office in 2013 and works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to ensure human rights elements are considered. Pearson writes frequently for a range of publications; her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Foreign Policy and The Washington Post.
Chasing Wrongs and Rights is Elaine’s human rights travelogue, a collection of stories detailing her experiences defending human rights around the world. Elaine has worked in this field for many years and her book will cover a range of human rights violations including the trafficking of women, ‘drug war’ killings by the police in the Philippines, intimidation and censorship faced by Chinese students and academics at Australian universities, and Australia’s shameful detention of asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea.
 
Elaine said, ‘I wrote this book to give a behind the scenes account of what it is like working in the human rights movement. So much goes into our reports that people don’t get to see. I hope to give readers an insider’s account of how we raise the costs of human rights violations to make perpetrators pay for what they do. This job is all about persistence. Sometimes it takes a long time to make change. .’
 
There are many reasons for writing this book, but Elaine pointed out that she ‘especially wanted to write this for young people from diverse backgrounds interested in social justice, because that was me. We see the world differently, we want to be a part of changing it, and we should be at the forefront of documenting discrimination or tackling abuse, but it is sometimes hard to know where to begin.’
 
Ben Ball, Publishing Director of Scribner Australia says: ‘Elaine is one of our most forceful and eloquent voices advocating for human rights; this book shares the first-hand experiences that fuel her passion. The breadth of those experiences means that this vivid personal story forms a compelling, highly-informative survey of the state of human rights today – abroad and in Australia – and the challenges that face those seeking to make the world a better place. We’re honoured to be publishing such an important, urgent work.’
 
 
Chasing Wrongs and Rights will be published in 2022.