Pan Mac swoops for Giddings ahead of Amazon Studios series

Pan Macmillan has swooped for Megan Giddings’ feminist speculative novel The Women Could Fly, currently being developed into a TV series for Amazon Studios.

Publishing director Gillian Green acquired British Commonwealth rights from Peggy Boulos Smith at Writers House on behalf of Dan Conaway. Pan Macmillan will publish the book in hardback, export trade paperback, audio and e-book in August 2022. The book is being developed as a limited series by Hillman Grad Productions, headed by Lena Waithe and Rishi Rajani. 

The publisher said: “The Women Could Fly is set in a world where witches are real and every woman is ’encouraged’ to be married by 30, lest they be tempted by magic. It’s a world in which Josephine Thomas has always felt her difference: she is mixed-race, bisexual in a conservative country and bears the stigma of having a mother who was accused of witchcraft and who disappeared when she was a child.”

Green added: “From the works of Alice Hoffman to Deborah Harkness and more recent novels like Stacey Halls’ The Familiars, witches are a perennial favourite topic for book lovers and Megan’s breathtakingly beautiful novel offers a wonderfully fresh, original, smart and thought-provoking perspective on the subject. I’m delighted to be welcoming Megan to Pan Macmillan. Her writing is powerful and exquisite and represents the very best of literary speculative fiction: magical, compelling and using a dystopian magical world to ask timely questions about how our own world treats women, and women of colour in particular.”

Giddings is an assistant professor at Michigan State University and affiliate faculty at Antioch University’s low-residency MFA. Her first novel Lakewood (William Morrow) was one of New York Magazine’s top 10 books of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, and was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize in the Ray Bradbury Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative category.

She said: “Gillian’s list at Pan Macmillan shows an interest in envisioning better worlds, deep and resonant imaginative work, and beautiful writing. It’s an honour to have The Women Could Fly in her brilliant hands.”

Boulos Smith added: “Gillian’s great taste makes her the perfect editor to bring Megan Giddings’ novel to UK and Australasian readers. From her initial enthusiastic emails after having read only a few pages, it was clear that Gillian’s connection to The Women Could Fly was immediate and profound. I’m so pleased that Megan will join the highly regarded Pan Mac list and with Gillian and the rest of the team behind her, I have no doubt that Megan’s engaging and provocative novel will touch readers all around the world.”