Prototype to bring out first UK edition of Kapil's 'innovative' Incubation

Prototype is to publish for the first time in the UK Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, a hybrid genre tale mixing prose and poetry that first came out in 2006. 

Publisher Jess Chandler acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Niki Chang at David Higham Associates. The novel will be published by Prototype in April 2023; Kelsey Street Press will publish a different edition in the US. 

Kapil has written seven poetry collections including How To Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press) which won the T S Eliot Prize. She is also a fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge and of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Incubation is a "formally innovative" book set in a shifting narrative where bodies, characters and text "are neither one thing nor another". It follows Laloo — a cyborg, girl, mother and child — on a road trip through America and American genre styles and form. The publisher said: "Incubation creates a radical space for what is ’monstrous’." 

Kapil said: "Incubation: A Space for Monsters is like a 30-year-old diary that’s just washed up on the west coast of the British Isles. Dripping, fragmented, sloppy and written in an archaic language, it is also a documentation, if that’s the right word, of the intense longing and desire to leave England, at a time (the 1990s) when access to the arts sector (as a practitioner, or even as an administrator) felt impossible.

"This is the book I wish I could have published in the UK when I wrote it, as a form of historical science-fiction, or prose-poetry that was also a kind of life-writing. I’m not sure that I had language for these inter-genre categories then, and I’m grateful to have found Prototype, a space for works that are modular, crumpled and stretched."

Chandler added: "It’s an honour to have the opportunity to bring this very significant work of Bhanu Kapil, a writer whose work we have admired for so long, to a UK readership. Incubation: A Space for Monsters is a wonderful early example of the scope and ambition of Bhanu’s radical writing, and this hybrid work is an amazing and fitting addition to our list."