Footnote lands ‘gorgeous, hallucinatory’ debut by prize-winner Horn

Footnote Press has acquired Voice of the Fish, a “hallucinatory” literary memoir from Lars Horn, winner of the Graywolf Press Non-fiction Prize. 

Editorial director Dave Watkins acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Katie Dublinski, associate publisher of Graywolf, for publication in September 2022.

Graywolf runs a non-fiction prize every year which Horn won in 2020 and which led to the publication of Voice of the Fish in the United States. With the deal, Footnote Press is bringing it to the UK for the first time.

The publisher describes Voice of the Fish as “a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory memoir that explores the trans experience through meditations upon aquatic life and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating injury that left the author temporarily unable to speak, read or write".

Its synopsis continues: “Horn swims through a range of subjects; across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity and illness. From their childhood modelling for their mother’s art installations – immersed in a  bath with dead squid; encased in a full-body plaster cast – to their travels before they were out as trans, these beguiling fragments are linked by a desire to interrogate the physical, and to identify the current beneath.

“Horn re-examines presumptions about the unchanging nature of the body, privileging instead ways of seeing and being that resist binaries; ways that falter, fracture, mutate.”

Watkins said: “Very occasionally, you come across an act of writing that stops you in your tracks with its intelligence and emotional honesty, and makes you view the world afresh. Lars’ gorgeous, structurally inventive and irresistibly readable book is one. I finished it, and immediately started it again. It is wonderful."

Horn commented: “Growing up, I never saw myself in books. Queer, transmasculine – I often still don’t. What might the body look like if written beyond the blurring of a gender binary? If elemental, nearing water, beast, or ancient god – bodies that morph, petrify, suddenly eclipse. And what might nonfiction resemble when put under formal tension – fragmented, photographic, sculptural, torn towards poetry?

“Years ago, I packed a bag and left the UK as I could not see a way of making a life for myself there. It still comes as an ache in the chest: to leave a home, to remember it – disjointed, shimmering. I am grateful to Footnote – this daring and intelligent new press – for providing the homecoming I never thought I’d see.”