W&N announces first foray into graphic storytelling with Rodriguez memoir

Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has acquired Worm: A Cuban-American Odyssey by illustrator Edel Rodriguez, “one of the most prominent political artists of our age".

Alexa von Hirschberg acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Hannah Whitaker at Rights People. Whitaker represented Pippin Properties for this deal. W&N’s first foray in graphic storytelling, it will publish on 7th November 2023. 

Rodriguez was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba. He is the recipient of both a Gold and a Silver Medal for editorial illustration from the Society of Illustrators, and his work has been featured on the covers of Time, the New Yorker and Der Spiegel.

Other clients include MTV, Pepsi, the US Postal Service, Nike, Rolling Stone, GQ, Playboy, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Conde Naste Traveler, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. His artwork is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian in Washington DC, as well as in many private collections.

The publisher says: “When Fidel Castro opened the Mariel harbour to let Cubans sail for America, Edel Rodriguez and his family took their chance. On a rickety shrimping boat bound for Florida, they joined the 1980 boatlift, becoming ’worms’, as Castro called the departing Cubans.

“Years later, Edel Rodriguez has become one of the most prominent political artists of our age, hailed for his iconic work on the cover of TIME Magazine documenting the Trump administration. In stunning visual detail, Worm tells his story – of a boyhood in Cold War Cuba, of a family’s courage and displacement and of coming of age as an artist, activist and American – only to find that the America of 2023 is closer to the Cuba of the 1980s.”

Von Hirschberg said: “Graphic novels and memoirs are increasingly finding avid readers in the UK and it’s a joy and privilege to be publishing W&N’s first graphic memoir this November. Worm is a powerful and exhilarating story of cold war tensions, family displacement, exile, immigration and longing by an iconic, award-winning political artist. Edel Rodriguez’s work is breathtaking and has sparked real conversations (and controversy). If you love MAUS (Penguin) or the work of Joe Sacco you must read Worm.”

Rodriguez said: “This book delves into the life of a family whose lives were forever changed by circumstances beyond their control. We often speak of what immigrants want from their adopted countries, but we don’t try harder to understand why they left their homeland and what they sacrificed to do so. Immigrants give up their families, homes, and memories, the sound of a grandmother’s voice, the feel of a mother’s hand, the warmth of a friend’s hug. They give them up for freedom, for safety, for a new beginning. I wanted to tell that story.”