Chatto signs award-winning journalist Elmhirst’s ‘extraordinary’ debut

Chatto & Windus has signed Maurice and Maralyn: A whale, a shipwreck and a portrait of a marriage at sea by award-winning journalist Sophie Elmhirst. 

Becky Hardie, deputy publishing director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander Associates at auction. Rights have also been pre-empted in Germany by Goldmann and in Hungary by Corvina. The “extraordinary” debut will publish in 2024. 

In Maurice and Maralyn, Elmhirst rediscovers a true story of survival at sea featuring, the publisher says, “high drama, love, loss and the thrill of escaping England in the 1970s”. 

In 1963, following a short and intense courtship, Maurice Bailey and Maralyn Harrison got married but realising that a conventional life was not for them, decided to sell everything they owned, build a boat and sail around the world. They set off in the summer of 1972 but early one morning on their way from Panama to the Galapagos, they were hit by a whale. The damage to the boat was beyond repair. 

The synopsis continues: “From a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they watched their boat slowly sink. Maurice and Maralyn spent nearly four months on that life raft, a dot in the world’s largest ocean—one of the longest life-raft survivals ever recorded. 

“In Maurice and Maralyn, Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs their extraordinary survival and its aftermath, drawing on unearthed footage and press coverage, the testimony of surviving friends, the diaries they kept, Maralyn’s galley handbook and the books Maurice published in the brief moment of fame that followed their return to land. What emerges is a story not just of adventure but of a passion for the sea and its imagined promises, of mental anguish and the workings of a marriage, of sudden celebrity and being forgotten.”

Elmhirst is a long read writer for the Guardian and the Economist’s 1843 magazine and is a contributing editor at the Gentlewoman and Harper’s Bazaar. In 2020 she won the British Press Award for Feature Writer of the Year for three of her Guardian long reads, including "Tampon Wars: the battle to overthrow the Tampax empire". Film rights to this story have been optioned by Dakota and Elle Fanning’s production company Lewellen Pictures.

Hardie said: “The plot of Maurice and Maralyn’s adventure on its own is beyond belief. But watching Sophie talking about the moment she first encountered Maurice, in a video of him talking about his and Maralyn’s time at sea, was also to witness a true writer finding her story.”

Elmhirst added: “When I came across Maurice and Maralyn’s voyage, it wasn’t just the drama of their ordeal that struck me, but their indelible, stoical, sometimes comically obsessive characters. Though their adventure was briefly a phenomenon, it was soon forgotten and I am extremely grateful to Becky Hardie and everyone at Chatto to have the chance to tell it.”