Canongate acquires debut by ex-Team GB swimmer Ajulu-Bushell

Canongate has acquired a memoir by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, an ex-international elite athlete and the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain. A "brave and beautiful" book, it reflects on race, identity, trauma, power and abuse.

Helena Gonda, senior commissioning editor, acquired world rights to These Heavy Black Bones from Victoria Hobbs at A M Heath. Canongate will publish in hardback, e-book and audio in June 2024, with a paperback to follow.

The synopsis said: "Rebecca learns that training is designed to be punishing – to break down, excoriate and puncture pain barriers. She learns that to swim a perfect race is to experience a sort of ecstatic communion between body and liquid world.

"And she also learns that her body, her Black body, is a commodity that other people feel entitled to, whose performance is constantly scrutinised, debated and subjected to a racism both universal and endemic to the white world of swimming."

Ajulu-Bushell is an ex-international elite athlete who swam for both Great Britain and Kenya over a 10-year career, quitting the GB Team just before the 2012 Olympic Games. She is a former world number one.

In her writing and filmmaking, Ajulu-Bushell is concerned with decolonisation through storytelling. In 2021, she won first prize in the Justice For Essay competition with Hegemanic America, a commentary on interracial relationships to the backdrop of the American immigration system. She was also honoured as part of Forbes 30-under-30 class of 2023 in Europe’s Social Impact category.

She said: "Writing, like swimming, is one of the greatest loves of my life, so, to be able to write about the thing that I know better than anything else is a privilege I have been dreaming of for such a long time. For my book to find a home at Canongate is an even greater privilege still. 

"Over the 10 years since I left the world of elite sport, I’d struggled to understand how to make my experience matter until now. To me, These Heavy Black Bones is more than a memoir, it’s an offering of freedom; to my younger self who wasn’t protected well enough from the power structures that govern our sporting institutions. And to everyone who has and continues to struggle against these same structures of oppression in the pursuit of excellence and self-expression, in the swimming pool and beyond."

Gonda commented: "In exquisite prose that is also wise and wonderfully well observed, Rebecca’s memoir tells of the mixed euphoria and shame that accompanied her act of laying claim to the water, and of the racist mythologies and abuses of power that forced her to turn her back on the elite sporting stage and forge a path for herself outside the pool. Rebecca is a rare talent and I can’t wait to introduce her to readers."