Scribe acquires bookseller’s award-winning debut in two-book deal

22 July 2014 Books+Publishing

Scribe has acquired Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson, the winning entry in the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Scribe acquired world rights in the novel in a two-book deal at auction from Clare Forster at Curtis Brown.

Allinson, a bookseller at Readings St Kilda in Melbourne, told Books+Publishing he was ‘incredibly honoured to be joining the wonderful crew at Scribe, who’ve been so supportive I already feel like crying’.

Scribe described Fever of Animals as a ‘thoughtful and beautifully observed novel about a man trying to make sense of his life through the prism of two overseas journeys he’s taken; one in which his relationship disintegrated, and the other in which he searches for a Romanian surrealist painter who disappeared in a forest in 1967’.

Publisher Henry Rosenbloom said Scribe was ‘delighted to be publishing Miles, and to be bringing to Australian and United Kingdom readers a genuinely exciting new literary talent’.

‘Miles’ work is characterised by some of the best writing I have seen in an Australian debut,’ he said.

Of his second novel, Allinson said: ‘I remember reading Dave Graney’s autobiography a few years ago, and thinking, “Damn! I wish I’d written that”. My next book is either going to be an unauthorized sequel to Dave Graney’s autobiography, or else it’ll be an adventure story about God and the deliriousness of childhood. And UFOs. Probably the latter.’

Fever of Animals is scheduled for publication in early 2016.

Category: Local news