Ten new Picador authors reveal inspirations at 2025 showcase

Ten new Picador authors from across the world discussed their new books on 6th November. 

Featuring a mixture of in-person readings and broadcast excerpts, guests gathered at the Pan Macmillan building, The Smithson, in central London. Publisher Mary Mount paid tribute to the “astonishing array of new work in 2025” and “some of the most original voices I’ve come across in recent years”.

She added: “In fiction it’s the year of Irish writing… and promises to be the year of the Irish début for Picador.” The rest of the evening was hosted by senior communications executive Kieran Sangha. 

The first novelist on the showcase was Brooklyn-based author Clare Sestanovich, who read from her début novel Ask me Again—compared to the works of Sally Rooney and Lily King—which is to be published on 23rd January 2025. Picador called it “a début novel about a young woman’s coming of age, in parallel with a renegade male friend who challenges her beliefs and the course of her life”. 

Fellow novelist PhD student Gráinne O’Hare shared her début novel Thirst Trap, which is scheduled for 12th June 2025, and follows three best friends Maggie, Harley and Róise living together in Northern Ireland, a year on from the tragic death of their other best friend. “They are struggling in their different ways with their hidden grief, how to forgive their friend for her past mistakes and how to move on from the home they all share together,” O’Hare said.  

“I initially started writing this novel because I’d moved from Belfast to Newcastle and wanted to reconnect with the streets of my home city. So I wrote about these women going about their lives and going through dark and difficult things. I find it dark and difficult to write and the characters weren’t coming together or 100% coming to life so I started over because although I wanted it to be full of loss I also wanted it to be about warmth and friendship.” 

Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play is dubbed by Picador a “puzzle box of a début novel”, due 3rd April 2025. It is: “A detective story, a whodunnit, a love story, a family story... or is it? Subverting everything you think you know about the murder mystery novel, it’s a dazzlingly inventive novel.” It begins on New Year’s Eve 2022 in Ireland and centres on a group of friends playing a murder mystery game which then plays out into real life. 

Across the non-fiction, guests heard from former barrister Charlie Colenutt’s book Is This Working? (6th March 2025). He spent around three years altogether collecting monologues from 68 people from all across the UK about what they do and what work means for them. “From the sex worker to the lorry driver, the hedge-fund manager to the veteran-turned-teacher, this is the poignant, entertaining and deeply insightful story of work in 21st-century Britain, as told by workers themselves,” Picador said. 

New York-based Hal Ebbott’s début novel Among Friends is published on 26th June 2025. A novel about two friends, one born in wealth and the other in poverty, who come to breaking point one weekend as old rivalries resurface. 

New York-based academic Augustine Sedgewick explores the nature of being a father and looks at famous examples in Fatherhood (due 29th May 2025). “When my son was born at he beginning of 2017 it felt like Bill Cosby’s mistrial was on the TV screen of every ward of the hospital… in the neighbourhood in the afternoons I’d scroll through on my phone the endless stream of MeToo stories which had just come out. My own Dad had just had a stroke that transformed his personality and these things together—cultural and personal—forced me to recognise that the fathers I’d recognised as a kid no longer existed.” He explained how he questioned the nature of fatherhood, looked to history and found many gaps around this. 

Social psychologist Professor Keon West described how he wrote The Science of Racism (23rd January 2025) in nine months: “It was the outpouring of many difficult and frustrating conversations I’ve had for a decade… People would say ‘you can’t possibly know if racism is still happening, you can suspect but you can’t know… If racism is a reason why someone is or isn’t promoted’… I was so frustrated because there is a whole discipline dedicated to knowing that.” 

Finally Queen’s University Belfast academic Garrett Carr read from his début novel The Boy From The Sea, about a baby mysteriously found by the sea. It is told in the communal voice of a small fishing town, about “ordinary lives made extraordinary and the drama of a small-town community… in a rapidly changing world”, according to Sangha. It is due to be published on 6th February 2025. 

Two poets also spoke for the showcase. Cork-based author Dean Browne’s début poetry collection After Party is partly inspired by his growing up in Tipperary and his working-class roots, due on 25th September 2025. He has been published in a range of publications including Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry and the Stinging Fly. 

Finally, fellow poet Jake Hawkey explores his childhood of growing up as the son of an alcoholic in a working- class south London family in his début poetry collection But & Though (27th February 2025). The collection was compared by Sangha to the likes of Raymond Antrobus, Rachel Long and Caleb Femi, “a fresh and poignant collection”.