Canongate scoops Garvey's 'brilliantly crafted' debut in four-way auction

Canongate has scooped a "brilliantly crafted" debut, The Wardrobe Department, and another novel by Elaine Garvey. Jenny Fry, publisher and commercial director, acquired world rights in the two books from Eleanor Birne at PEW following a four-way auction.

The Wardrobe Department will be published in spring 2025 with Leah Woodburn as Garvey’s primary editor. It is set in 2002 and narrated by Mairéad Sweeney, a young woman who has moved from rural Ireland to work as a dresser at a theatre in London’s West End. Questioning her decision to move to London, she is led to "to confront the truths about herself" when she returns to Ireland following her grandmother’s death.

Garvey completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, and her short stories have been published in the Dublin Review and Winter Papers. She began The Wardrobe Department on a Stinging Fly fiction-writing course with Sean O’Reilly, and continued it under the Words Ireland mentorship programme with Danielle McLaughlin. 

She said: "The team at Canongate are exceptional and their response to The Wardrobe Department has made a profound impact on me. Their passion and ambition for Mairéad Sweeney’s story is astonishing, as is their collaborative and supportive approach.

"I am deeply grateful to Eleanor Birne for the care and attention she has given to this and am thrilled to have found such a wonderful home for my work."

Fry added: "There is so much beauty and tenderness in Elaine Garvey’s writing. She has been honing her skills as a short story writer and now with The Wardrobe Department, she has created a complicated and real protagonist.

"Mairéad echoes so many of our fears and insecurities but has a fire to light within her and you root for her every step of the way. There is so much love for this novel right across Canongate and we can’t wait for more people to read and fall in love, just as we have."

Woodburn commented: "Debuts as moving and brilliantly crafted as The Wardrobe Department are a rare thing. Elaine writes so honestly and insightfully about outsiderness and that ache we all have to belong, and she does it all with the perfect balance of warmth and bite. We feel sure that she has a wonderful literary career ahead of her, and it’s a dream to be publishing her on the Canongate list."