Canongate scoops Goh's 'hauntingly beautiful' hybrid memoir in seven-way auction

Canongate has scooped Katie Goh’s "hauntingly beautiful" hybrid memoir, Foreign Fruit, that follows the journey and cultivation of the orange to explore the author’s own identity and themes of globalisation, colonialism and migration.

Helena Gonda, senior commissioning editor, acquired world (excluding North American) rights to the book from Matthew Turner at RCW in a seven-way auction. Canongate will publish in hardback, e-book and audio in May 2025, with a paperback to follow. North American rights were acquired by Masie Cochran at Tin House.

The publisher’s synopsis said: "Foreign Fruit is the author’s endeavour to flesh out these contradictions, to unpeel the layers of personhood; a reflection on identity through the cipher of the metaphorised orange, and as a journey from east-to-west and west-to-east."

Goh is a writer and editor at Extra Teeth literary magazine, and was previously first person editor at gal-dem. Her writing has been shortlisted for Wigtown Book Festival’s Anne Brown Essay Prize, PPA Scotland’s Young Journalist of the Year Award and the University of Glasgow’s Kavya Prize. Her book of essays, The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters (404 Ink), was a Reviewer’s Choice for the Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021, and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022.

She said: "I am deeply grateful to Helena and her colleagues at Canongate for their immediate passion, expertise and care for my story and to my agent Matt Turner for his guidance along this journey."

Gonda added: "The way Katie uses a searching, meditative and wide-ranging narrative encounter with a simple fruit to unpick conversations around culture, empire, history and identity is powerful. I’m delighted to be welcoming her to Canongate."