Picador pre-empts Akbar’s ‘transcendental’ début

Picador has landed Martyr!, a “transcendental” novel of loss and belonging from début novelist Kaveh Akbar. 

Editorial director Anne Meadows pre-empted UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, and audio from Jessica Bullock at the Wylie Agency. Jordan Pavlin pre-empted North American rights for Knopf. The novel will be published in spring 2024.

Akbar has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes for his poetry. He has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and his latest collection Pilgrim Bell (Chatto) has been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for Poetry. 

Martyr! follows Cyrus, an Iranian-American man, who is a medical actor and recovering alcholic. His mother died in a terrible act of US imperial violence and as he searches for meaning he is guided by the voices of artists, poets and kings to a terminally ill artist who is living out her days in the Brooklyn Museum. 

Meadows said: “Martyr!  is funny and smart and written so beautifully I wanted to cut out its gem-like sentences and paper my walls. It is a novel that enacts the transcendence its characters so desire – that lifts the reader beyond the trouble and horror of the daily, and shows us that life is not long at all, and yet each finite set of moments has the promise of beauty. Like Leaving the Atocha Station and No One is Talking About This, Akbar’s début shows a poet as at home in his prose as he is in breaking the line. We are thrilled to welcome him to Picador.”