Picador wins four-way auction for 10 books from Kincaid

Picador has won a four-way auction for 10 books from Jamaica Kincaid, hailed by the publisher as “one of our greatest living writers”.

Commissioning editor Kishani Widyaratna and associate editor Paul Martinovic acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in physical, e-book and audio from Tracy Bohan and Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency.

Kincaid is the award-winning Antiguan-American author of more than a dozen books. Her essays, stories and novels offer evocative portrayals of the mother-daughter relationship, self-determination, the life of making art and the legacy of colonialism.

The 10 titles to be released by Picador are the novels Annie John, The Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy, Mr Potter and her most recent novel, See Now Then; the non-fiction works Talk Stories and My Brother; the books on gardening, My Garden Book and Among Flowers; and the short-story collection At the Bottom of the River.

The first selection of titles will be published by Picador in summer 2022, and the second selection will be published in summer 2023. Publication will be supported by a significant marketing and publicity campaign featuring the author.

Her books Lucy, Annie John and At the Bottom of the River were published in Picador’s paperback white-spine series in the 1980s. Kincaid is published by FSG in the US, and the move to Picador brings all of her work in the English language to Macmillan.

Kincaid was a New Yorker staff writer for decades, writing the "Talk of the Town" column. Her writing has variously been compared to that of Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and V S Naipaul, and it has been praised by writers including Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie.

Widyaratna said: “Jamaica Kincaid is one of our greatest living writers. It’s a huge honour for us to welcome her back to the Picador list, and to make so many of her books available for the first time in the UK. I can’t wait for more readers to discover her radical work; to my mind she should be read as widely as iconic writers such as Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy and Elena Ferrante."

Martinovic, who leads backlist publishing at Picador, added: “The acquisition of Jamaica's collected works, 35 years after Picador first published her seminal novel Annie John, is incredibly exciting. With these 10 titles Jamaica immediately has become one of our most important backlist authors, and is someone that we are collectively determined to introduce to the wider audience that she deserves in the UK.”