Faber to publish poet and ex-Picador editor Paterson's memoir

Faber is to publish Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by poet and former Picador editor Don Paterson.

Faber acquired world all language rights from Peter Strauss at RCW Literary Agency to the memoir in a deal struck 15 years ago, with its publication slated for 19th January 2023. 

Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963 and spent his boyhood on a council housing estate. "When he wasn’t busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys’ Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness," the synopsis reads. 

"While he didn’t manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first 20 years of his life – before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London – did, for better or worse, shape who he would become."

"Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation," the publisher says.

Paterson’s poetry has won awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes and, on two occasions, the T S Eliot Prize. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for more than 25 years, held the post of poetry editor at Picador. He also works as a jazz musician.