Fitzcarraldo Editions acquires 'radical' Hattrick debut

Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired the debut book by Alice Hattrick, combining memoir, medical history and biography to uncover untold case histories of medically unexplained and invisible illness.

Publisher Jacques Testard acquired world rights to Ill Feelings from Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates. It will be published in autumn 2021.

Its synopsis explains: “Written from a personal and feminist perspective, the book draws on a long history of women writing through pain and fragility. Rooted in the author and her mother's almost simultaneous diagnosis with M.E. in the late '90s, Alice Hattrick's collective biography of illness branches out into the records of ill health women have written about in diaries and letters. Her cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, and the artist Louise Bourgeois.”

Hattrick’s criticism and interviews have appeared in publications including frieze magazine, Art Review and the White Review. She was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize in 2016. 

Testard said: “Alice Hattrick is a distinctive and impressive new literary voice whose work I have been reading for several years, ever since we first published her in the White Review. Ill Feelings is a hugely ambitious and radical book. I am very excited that she has chosen to publish it with Fitzcarraldo Editions and hope this will be the first of many books we publish together.”