Coates' portrait of the Barack Obama era to Hamish Hamilton

Simon Prosser, publishing director of Hamish Hamilton has acquired two new books from Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

The first book, We Were Eight Years in Power, is a portrait of the Barack Obama era, developed out of Coates’s sequence of essays for The Atlantic magazine, which began with 2012’s "Fear of a Black President" and culminated in this year’s "My President Was Black", which drew on several interviews by Coates with Obama. Hamish Hamilton will publish in October 2017.

The second book is an as-yet-untitled work of fiction, which Coates is working on.

UK and Commonwealth rights were acquired from Denise Cronin, rights director at Random House. Both books are being published in the US by Chris Jackson’s new imprint One World at Random House. 

Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, was last year counted among Time magazine's top 100 "most influential" people. The US author wrote Between the World and Me (Text Publishing) and is the writer of the Black Panther series for Marvel Comics.

Prosser said: "Ta-Nehisi is an incredible writer – one of the most eloquent, impassioned and humane voices we have. With extraordinary power, grace and clarity, his writing brings the real news behind the ‘fake news’ smokescreen and remind us of the deep, unignorable, still raw history which shapes what it means to be  black in America. His rise to literary prominence coincides almost exactly with the Obama Era, and with cultural and political debates around racism, criminal justice and inequality which he has himself helped to shape. I couldn’t be happier to welcome him to Hamish Hamilton and to Penguin."