Bluebird swoops on Shukla's 'empowering' writing guide

Pan Mac imprint Bluebird has acquired a “uniquely empowering” writing guide by author Nikesh Shukla.

Publisher Carole Tonkinson bought world rights from Charlotte Atyeo of Kingsford Campbell in Your Story Matters: A Practical Guide to Finding Your Voice and Telling the Stories that Matter to You, due for publication in 2021.

The “friendly, accessible guide” will include advice on a range of writing styles and forms, examples from Shukla’s own writing life and a variety of prompts and exercises. It comes off the back of a newsletter of creative writing tips and prompts the author launched in 2019.

The blurb explains: “Your Story Matters will be a uniquely empowering writing guide, going far beyond technical style and incorporating tips on how to feel empowered to share their experience in memoir or fiction. Your Story Matters draws on Shukla’s vast experience of mentoring young writers and those from marginalised backgrounds. Shukla’s advice invites everyone – whether they consider themselves to be writers or not, and whatever their level of expertise – to express their experiences and thoughts and capture their truth.”

Nikesh Shukla is an author, screenwriter and is the editor of essay collection The Good Immigrant (Unbound). His first non-fiction book Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home will be published by Bluebird in February 2021.

He said: “I've been mentoring writers for years, and a lot of them have gone on to great success. One of the things I've always been keen on, whether it was curating and editing or developing writers, is to use my experience to empower writers to tell the stories that matter to them. As I've been teaching more and more recently this book feels like the natural conclusion to the work I've been doing over the last decade. I'm so happy to be working with the gloriously open and sensitive editor Carole Tonkinson and the team at Bluebird to bring this project to all the writers out there who just need writing advice to be clear, informal, achievable and honest.”

Tonkinson added: “Nikesh is a beautiful writer and a galvanising mentor. I am confident that Nikesh will help facilitate an important contingent of storytellers to bear witness to their own experience, thereby allowing readers into their worlds, whether this exchange takes shape as fiction, memoir, blogpost, poetry or essay. We are absolutely thrilled to be working with Nikesh on a second non-fiction title.”