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SCRIBNER AUSTRALIA TO PUBLISH A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY THE GUARDIAN COLUMNIST AND REPORTER HELEN SULLIVAN

Credit @Jessica Hromas /The Guardian

 

Scribner Australia is delighted to announce a deal with James Pullen from the Wylie Agency to publish Guardian columnist and reporter Helen Sullivan’s nonfiction collection of writing Calcium-Magnesium. Helen is a highly accomplished journalist who has reported from Lebanon, South Africa and Australia for the Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker and London Review of Books online. Her New Yorker feature on the Great Barrier Reef was shortlisted for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and anthologised in the Best Australian Science Writing. However, she is best known for her "Nature of..." columns for the Guardian, which profile a different insect or animal every fortnight, and which have been read nearly two million times in nine months.
In keeping with this highly successful column Helen’s book will be an exploration, through reportage and memoir, of how our encounters with the natural world – with animals and insects, with the outdoors, and with science and medicine – shape and reflect who we are.
Helen said: ‘Calcium-Magnesium enlists readers on a personal, expansive and, I hope, funny expedition to understand the ways we experience science and the natural world: through emotion, language and literature. I'm so happy that this book has found an editor in Ben Ball and a home at Scribner. Many thanks to James Pullen at Wylie for his encouragement and support.’
Scribner’s publisher Ben Ball commented: ‘Helen’s writing is just the kind of work I love to read – in the vein of Robert MacFarlane, Rebecca Solnit and Delia Falconer. While she’s fascinated by – and renders fascinating – the natural world, the world outside, she’s also unafraid to test that against the world inside. As her (literally) wildly popular columns for the Guardian show, she’s got an eye for the entertaining detail, and a gift for getting to what matters. I’m thrilled she’s joining Scribner.’
 
Scribner acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Helen’s book and will publish it in 2023.