Canongate nabs Geoff Dyer's memoir on 1960s Britain

Canongate has acquired the rights to Homework, Geoff Dyer’s family memoir on 1960s Britain.

Publisher at large Francis Bickmore bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, while North American rights were acquired by Alexander Star at Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG). Canongate will publish in May 2025.

"In Homework, Geoff Dyer reflects on his childhood and what it means to come of age in England in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country shaped by the aftermath Second World War but accelerating towards change," the synopsis says. 

Dyer is the author of numerous novels and non-fiction books, including Out of Sheer Rage (Canongate) and The Last Days of Roger Federer (Canongate). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Science, and he is writer in residence at the University of Southern California.

"I’d completed a more or less finished version of this extended bit of homework when I was interviewed by a Portuguese journalist about the translation of my previous book, The Last Days of Roger Federer," he said. "Having written a book about endings, he asked, was I tempted to write one about beginnings? Absolutely not, I said, oblivious, until a couple of weeks later, this time in conversation with an Italian journalist, to the fact that I had just finished a book about beginnings — specifically my own."

Bickmore added: "Homework is Dyer’s first conventional memoir and by far his most personal book. It’s an act of love to his parents and his working-class childhood in Cheltenham, as well as an exploration of a certain kind of post-war sensibility that is critical to what Britain was and is now. We are very excited about making this a big splashy publication next May, 80 years after VE Day when post-war Britain began."