Footnote Press commissions ‘strikingly original’ memoir of autism and identity set in Saudi Arabia

Footnote Press has signed Drifts from debut author Natasha Burge, a “strikingly original” memoir of autism and transcultural identity set in Saudi Arabia. 

Consulting editor Candida Lacey acquired world rights in all languages directly from the author for publication by Footnote in February 2023.

The publisher says Drifts explores the souks, sands and cities of the Arabian Gulf, where the author is a native-born foreigner, to discover a new mapping of the self and a celebration of what it means to be different.

Natasha Burge was born and grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her family has lived for more than half a century. On a field trip to Riyadh aged 12 she became aware that she was not from Saudi Arabia, and that as foreigners they would one day have to leave.

Through various departures and returns – a year at boarding school in New England, university in London, a small town in Texas, back to the Arabian Gulf to live and work in Bahrain – her sense of self begins to fragment and each episode is more difficult than the last. Finally, after years of difficulty, isolation and severe anxiety, at 37 years old she is given the life-changing news that she is autistic.

In Drifts, an early extract of which was a finalist for the 2021 Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize, Burge probes her unfurling awareness by exploring the two ruptured strands of her being: what it means to grow up at the interstices of different cultures, and what it is to experience an undiagnosed condition and late diagnosis of autism.

Lacey said: “Burge embraces rather than resists the way that her physical and psychological journeys are inevitably and inextricably entwined.

“In so doing she maps a vibrant psychogeography that gives pre-eminence to autistic modes of perception and expression. She shares her prodigious gift for perception, bringing to life vivid landscapes, city streets and markets, desert sunsets and unseen waters flowing beneath the earth.

“Drifts encourages us not only to seek the marvellous in the mundane but, like Natasha, to learn to expect it. The result is a work of dazzling insight, sensitivity and awareness that explodes our idea of memoir and place.”