Profile Books to publish a 'searing portrait of Indigenous survival' by Julian Brave NoiseCat

Profile Books has acquired We Survived the Night, a "searing portrait of Indigenous survival" by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and writer Julian Brave NoiseCat.

Former publisher Helen Conford acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, including e-book, audio and serial, from Natasha Fairweather at Rogers, Coleridge and White, on behalf of Alice Whitwham at the Cheney Agency. Editorial director Louisa Dunnigan will publish the book on 16th October 2024 and Knopf will publish in North America.

"As an infant, Julian Brave NoiseCat’s father was found abandoned in a dumpster," the synopsis says. "Against all odds, he survived and made it out of his impoverished reservation only to abandon his own son. As a young man, NoiseCat embarks on an unforgettable journey into his family’s past and his people’s present."

It adds: "Told in the style of a ‘Coyote Story’, an art form nearly annihilated by colonisation, this genre-defying blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage unravels old stories and braids together new ones. NoiseCat grapples with the erasure of North America’s First Peoples, and the trauma that cascades across generations, and illuminates the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental and political movements that are reshaping the future. Virtuosic, compelling and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love and resurgence."

Noisecat said: "We Survived the Night tells a story about the First peoples of Canada and the United States that is at once personal and global. Interwoven with a father-son story as well as years of reportage in Indigenous communities, We Survived the Night is as formally innovative as it is geographically ambitious. In that sense, it’s a young man’s book, reflecting my own reckoning with who I am, where I come from, what was taken and how my people are coming back from the brink of annihilation."

Dunnigan added: "I am so excited for readers to encounter Julian’s electrifying book – gorgeously written, deftly blending personal history with political urgency, it tells a story of loss and resurgence that will leave readers breathless. Introducing us to a world that many in the UK know shamefully little about, despite our tangled histories, Julian brings Indigenous lives and stories into the spotlight with dazzling clarity."