Daunt Books Publishing nabs Bullwinkel's novel and short story collection

Daunt Books Publishing has nabbed Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot, as well as her "grotesque and tender" short story collection, Belly Up.

Publisher Marigold Atkey acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Luke Ingram at the Wylie Agency.

Headshot, which will be published in March 2024, tells the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the US. It is set over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs.

The synopsis said: "As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight."

Bullwinkel’s collection of short stories, Belly Up, will publish in May 2024. It contains "ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches".

The author’s writing has been published in the White Review, BOMB,  NOON , Guernica, and others. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

Both Bullwinkel’s fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she is an editor at large for McSweeney’s, the deputy editor of The Believer, a contributing editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. Belly Up (A Strange Object), her debut, garnered a 2022 Whiting Award upon publication in the US.

She said: "The thing I was chasing with Headshot was the joyful feeling of single-minded obsession, and the ways in which the playing of games has the rare electric ability to shape a collective memory. Both Headshot and Belly Up circle the complex realities of living in a female body, and also question the boundaries of gender, death, partnering and notions of family.

"Daunt has published countless books that have shaped me as both a reader and a thinker. I am deeply honored to be published alongside such a luminous list."

Atkey added: "Rita Bullwinkel’s writing creates a world that is intense and intoxicating. Her clean, direct prose takes you straight into the voice and heart of her narrators, as she explores physicality, gender, death and selfhood.

"Whether tied to vivid, grubby reality or slipping into the fantastical, her writing is rich with humanity and warmth, and is at once deeply intimate and movingly universal. I think Rita’s a total star and I’m so excited to be introducing her shimmering brilliance to a UK audience."