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Vintage Classics sign Josephine Baker’s memoir for first time English translation
Vintage Classics has signed Fearless and Free, the memoir from Josephine Baker in a new translation from Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis.
Editorial director Charlotte Knight acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Christine Bonnard Legrand at Libella Group. US rights went to Tiny Reparations. Vintage Classics will publish in February 2025 with an introduction by Ijeoma Oluo.
Baker became the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture in 1927 after moving to Paris from St Louis, Missouri. During the Second World War, Baker joined the French intelligence. For her work she was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Later, Baker joined the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, speaking alongside Martin Luther King Jr in Washington, August 1963.
Touted as a “flirtatious, funny, candid and unconventional” memoir, Fearless and Free is formed from a series of conversations Baker had with French journalist Marcel Sauvage over more than 20 years. It offers a “vivid” insight into Baker’s life.
Knight commented: “This book gives us an intimate insight into what [Baker] was actually like as a person and tells the story of her adventures. It also shows how she changed and grew over a 20-year period and the experiences that led up to her commitment to civil rights. It is a small miracle that this book exists and I’m amazed it has never been translated into English before. It will be a huge honour and a lot of fun to publish it.”
Zafar and Lewis said Fearless and Free presented a “curious challenge of a translation project”, adding that the “book’s vivid orality means that whether as a reader or translator, you feel you are sitting with Baker herself, with all the meanderings and nuances of the stories and views she shares”.
