Canongate lands Alice Vincent's Hark: How Women Listen

Canongate has landed Alice Vincent’s Hark: How Women Listen, an examination of women’s relationship with sound.

Helena Gonda, senior commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Rachel Mills at Rachel Mills Literary for publication in April 2025.

In Hark, Vincent examines why, "although we’re told women are good at listening, we rarely examine what they’re listening to, what their worlds sound like, or how it feels to be expected to listen in a world of noise made by men".

Vincent said: "I have so appreciated Canongate’s enthusiasm for Hark, a book that has encouraged me to expand out of nature writing and into broader realms of the stuff that makes us human. Writing this book fundamentally changed me, and I’m also hoping it will offer readers new ways of listening."

Gonda added: "On one level this book is a personal quest to rediscover sound as something alive and vital and restorative, but it also touches on so many of the universal experiences that make us human."

Canongate describes the book as "for women who feel unheard".