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Indie Swift Press is to publish The Daughters of Kobani by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, the story of the all-female militia who fought off ISIS in northern Syria.
Mark Richards at Swift bought UK Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Natasha Fairweather at RCW, on behalf of Elyse Cheney at Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. The non-fiction work has been optioned for TV by Hillary Clinton’s HiddenLight Productions.
In 2013 a group of Kurdish women in northern Syria created a fighting force that, just a year later, would wage war against ISIS as a partner of the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women's equality a reality by fighting—house by house, street by street, town by town—the men who bought and sold women.
Lemmon’s book shines a light on these women and their extraordinary courage and determination not only to defeat the Islamic State on the battlefield, but to bring their political vision centered on women’s equality to reality across the Middle East.
The book is published in the US by Penguin Press this week, with Swift set to follow in July 2021.
Commenting on the acquisition, Richards said: "The Daughters of Kobani brings to vivid life an extraordinary group of female fighters. It is both deeply researched and utterly compelling, and I’m not at all surprised there has been such a frenzy for TV rights. We at Swift are thrilled to be publishing it in the UK and Commonwealth."
Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ashley's War and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. She is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as partner and chief marketing officer at Shield AI, a technology company focused on national security. She regularly appears on CNN, PBS, MSBNC, and NPR, and she has spoken on national security topics at the Aspen Security Forum, Clinton Global Initiate and TED.