Bloomsbury Children's snaps up Grown: The Black Girls’ Guide to Growing Up in six-way auction

Bloomsbury Children’s Books has acquired a title from the founders of Black Girls’ Book Club following a six-way auction.

The book, titled Grown: The Black Girls’ Guide to Growing Up, is by Natalie A Carter and Melissa Cummings-Quarry. It is scheduled for publication in 2021. Isobel Doster, senior editor for children’s non-fiction, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including Canada, from Lauren Gardner at Bell Lomax Moreton Agency in a six-publisher auction.

Since the two best friends launched the club in London a few years ago, there have been many meetings, as well as a book club trip and workshop in Tobago, debates at the Houses of Parliament, and events with the likes of Angie Thomas and Malorie Blackman.

"Grown will be the essential life skills book for black teenage girls," Bloomsbury said. "It will cover everything from how to care for your natural hair to navigating micro-aggressions in school and managing your own money. Written with sensitivity and humour, Grown is a celebration of black British girlhood that will empower a generation."

Doster said: "Receiving Natalie and Melissa’s unique, honest and motivating proposal inspired us to raise our game—we’re so excited to partner with them to change the story in non-fiction for young adults, with books by inspirational black women for young black women. Natalie and Melissa’s fearless ambition is utterly infectious; we can’t wait to amplify their voices, so that young black girls across the country feel safe, supported and galvanised to chase their own dreams."

The authors said: "We are so incredibly pleased to be in a position to accept this offer for Grown from Isobel and the team at Bloomsbury. Black Girls’ Book Club was founded with one mission in mind: to create a space for black women and girls and to be a creative home to bring this vision together. With Bloomsbury, we have found a project that aligns so incredibly closely with our own that it was as if we crafted the pitch document ourselves. We want Grown to be a real game-changer and to not only disrupt the publishing industry, but to lead innovative change that ensures that young black girls and women like us feel catered to and seen."

Interviewed by The Bookseller in 2018, the pair explained how they created the book club: "BGBC was created after a few too many bottles of prosecco and some oysters in our favourite restaurant, where we were talking about boys, our careers and the latest life-changing book we had read. We were very lucky [because] there were very few challenges when setting up BGBC. There was so much support, not only in London and across the UK, but even as far afield as the Caribbean and the US."