BEN BALL ACQUIRES ANZ RIGHTS TO HIGHLY CONTESTED DEBUT COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES FOR SCRIBNER AUSTRALIA

Scribner Australia is delighted to announce its acquisition of ANZ rights to Chloe Wilson’s debut collection of stories, Hold Your Fire, in a four-way auction from agents Rach Crawford and Kate Johnson at MacKenzie Wolf. The story ‘Hold Your Fire’ – about a missile-making mother troubled by her husband’s guts and her son’s metal – appears in the current Spring edition of Granta Magazine. ‘Tongue-Tied’ won the 2019 Iowa Review Fiction Prize, judged by Rebecca Makkai. Scribner will publish in early 2021.

 

 

Scribner Publishing Director Ben Ball says: ‘Chloe Wilson is a genuinely thrilling new voice in Australian fiction. A kind of contemporary Gothic, her stories are marvellously unsettling, both haunting and funny, always brilliantly controlled. They strip away the varnish of decency to expose our raw grain of desire and power. She is making art.’

 

 

Chloe Wilson says: ‘I'm absolutely delighted to be working with Scribner. They're publishing some really impressive new Australian work and I'm thrilled to be included on their list.’

 

 

Chloe Wilson’s work has appeared in Best Australian Poems, Award Winning Australian Writing, ELLE Australia, The Big Issue, The Southampton Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, Review of Australian Fiction, Cordite, Nat. Brut, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Island, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin and Chicago Literati, among others. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is also the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poem ‘Soft Serve’ recently won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Chloe is a former Voiceworks Poetry Editor and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne. Chloe lives in Melbourne.