Footnote Press scoops debut from 'blinding new voice' Duncan

Footnote Press has scooped the "electric" debut novel of trans-masculinity from Eliot Duncan, titled Ponyboy. 

Former commissioning editor Kwaku Osei-Afrifa acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Ian Bonaparte and PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit. Editor Grace Harrison will be taking over the title. The novel will be published in June 2023. 

Ponyboy has been pitched as a bildungsroman set over three "acts" following the "pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt" narrator called Ponyboy as they slowly begin to unravel. The reader follows the narrator as they chase Baby, a lesbian painter, to Berlin and then back to Ponyboy’s childhood home after an overdose and finally, to rehab. 

Harrison commented: "From the moment Ponyboy first landed in my inbox I have been obsessed! When we first meet Ponyboy he is a thirsty, thrill-seeking missile and a powder-keg of self-destruction, the person always searching for the next party. As the novel unfolds, we’re pulled with him into liminal worlds, through love and loss, art and writing, self-destruction and recovery. Eliot’s writing is confident, urgent and kinetic. Ponyboy thrums with the joys, the aches and the pains of becoming who we are meant to be, and Eliot Duncan is a blinding new literary voice."