Tinder Press picks up Cosslett's 'tender' memoir in five-way auction

Tinder Press has acquired The Year of the Cat, a memoir by journalist and author Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, in a five-way auction.

Mary-Anne Harrington, publisher, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Eleanor Birne at PEW Literary. The memoir will be published as Tinder Press's lead non-fiction launch title in February 2023. 

Centring on the author’s experience of adopting a kitten called Mackerel during lockdown, The Year of the Cat will explore the enduring relationship between women writers and artists and their cats, while shining a light on the author’s experience as a survivor of trauma and PTSD. 

Cosslett lives in London with her husband and cat. She writes columns and reviews fiction for the Guardian and her debut novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, was published by Sandstone Press in 2018.

She said: "I’m thrilled to be publishing my creative non-fiction debut with Tinder Press. I wrote The Year of the Cat during lockdown, but it contains thoughts and feelings that have been with me my entire adult life, on trauma and the fragmentation of memory, on what it means to care, and on how a woman can continue to make art when she is engaged with that labour. It means so much to be to have found such a perfect home for this book."

Harrington commented: "I knew in a heartbeat that The Year of the Cat was a little classic of women’s literature; the kind of book that has the most glorious, enduring shelf-life. With characteristic deftness, intelligence and humour, Rhiannon takes an experience familiar to so many of us – bringing a small, helpless creature into our hearts and homes – and uses it illuminate timely questions: from whether to become a mother in this precarious historical moment to the spectre of the 'crazy cat woman' used to disparage the child-free. Readers who love Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography sequence, or Emilie Pine’s essays, will read The Year of the Cat with delighted recognition."