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Canongate has acquired Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It, a personal guide and exploration to rethinking and living with anxiety by Tim Clare.
Jo Dingley, commissioning editor acquired world rights in the title from Sophie Lambert at C+W Agency. Coward will publish on 5th May 2022 in hardback.
Clare has suffered from anxiety and panic attacks for over a decade. At their worst, his attacks would see him curled on the floor, screaming at his wife for help. When they became more than he and his family could manage, he made a promise to himself – he would try everything he could to get better, every method and medicine.
The publisher said: "In Coward, he explores all the possible treatments for anxiety, from SSRIs to hypnosis, running to extreme diets. He interviews experts and becomes a guinea pig, testing their methods on himself. At the end of a year of many ups and downs, Tim discovers what helps him (and what doesn’t), and what might help others. Most of all he comes to rethink anxiety and encourages all of us to do the same."
Clare is an award-winning writer, poet and creative writing podcaster. He is the author of We Can’t All Be Astronauts (Ebury) and the novels The Honours (Canongate) and The Ice House (Canongate). He has performed his work at festivals and clubs across the world, on BBC TV and radio. His has also written for the Guardian, Times, Independent and Big Issue, and presents the creative writing podcast "Death Of 1,000 Cuts".
He said: "As a full-time anxiety sufferer, I'd hoped writing Coward would be a massive skive. After all, it was my specialist subject. It turned out that anxiety is much more slippery than the lifestyle articles and pop psych books would have us believe. I spent a year getting schooled by world experts in neuroscience, genetics, microbiology, AI, psychiatry and other fields, obsessively reading research, and testing new treatments on myself. I can't wait to share the book. It's no exaggeration to say it changed my life."