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Picador buys brand Bola

01.03.09 | Benedicte Page

Picador has announced its first acquisitions under new publisher Paul Baggaley, including 11 novels by the cult Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Bolaño's epic work 2666 has just been published by Picador to critical acclaim, hitting the top 10 original fiction bestseller list. Baggaley bought The Third Reich, a novel completed by Bolaño shortly before his death in 2003 and as yet unpublished in any language, from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. It will be published in 2011.

Baggaley has also acquired 10 other Bolaño titles, previously untranslated into English, from Tim Bates at Pollinger on behalf of the US publisher New Directions. The first of these, Amulet, will be published in hardback this autumn, alongside the paperback of 2666. The remaining Bolaño novels will be published over the following two years.

Baggaley said: "We are creating a whole look for Bolaño, creating a brand. We could never have expected the level of response that 2666 has created and you do have to take advantage of that." He described Bolaño as, "a cult writer we can all discover, producing challenging, weird, extra­ordinary but also completely readable novels".

Baggaley, who joined Pan Macmillan from HarperCollins late last year, added: "I held my first Picador meeting in November, against the background of the global financial crisis. But we've had tremendous support from [Pan Macmillan m.d.] Anthony Forbes-Watson and there's such a will from within the company, where the sales people love Picador and want us to be publishing exciting books. Picador suffered slightly from not having a pub­lisher here [the imprint was without a publisher for several months before Baggaley's appointment], so some deals weren't being finalised, while the editors were also waiting for me to arrive to know if I took a dif­ferent view [on
acquisitions]."

Baggaley has also acquired Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, an "incredibly playful, postmodern" novel about a great Filipino writer. Picador bought the book from Peter Straus on behalf of Melanie Jackson and will publish in spring 2010.

Also announced this week were new deals with existing Picador authors. John Banville has signed up for two detective novels under his pseudonymn Benjamin Black, bought from Ed Victor; Oliver Sacks will write The Mind's Eye, a book about how we perceive the world, bought from Andrew Wylie of the Wylie Agency; and Peter Godwin will write an up-to-the-minute account of Mugabe's years in power in Zimbabwe, The Fear, also bought from Andrew Wylie.

Other acquisitions include a novel about bereavement, One Moment, One Morning by young British writer Sarah Rayner, bought by Picador's Sam Humphreys from Vivien Green at Sheil Land.

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