Canongate wins four-way auction for Renny Gong's debut novel
Canongate has acquired Ping Pong Kids, a “hilarious and poignant” coming-of-age debut novel about a table-tennis prodigy from Renny Gong, MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Editor at large Leah Woodburn acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Sam Birmingham, with US rights signed by Deborah Ghim at Ecco.
Set to be published in April 2027, the novel is described as “Marty Supreme meets Headshot”. The blurb reads: “When 12-year-old America arrives alone in Qingdao, China to spend the summer at an elite table-tennis academy, he thinks he’s prepared – ranked number five in the US for his age and having trained his whole life, under Mother’s watch, for his hard-won success. But the academy is no summer camp: it’s a militant breeding ground for champion ping-pong players, complete with 10 hours of training a day and strict punishments; his new peers, meanwhile, regard their fresh competitor with suspicion.
“Just as America begins to find his way in the brutal hierarchy and acclimatise to his surroundings, Mother appears in Qingdao without warning and his new life shifts again. With tryouts looming for a high-stakes tournament, Mother’s presence is at once a source of comfort and stress – and the future they have always worked towards hangs in the balance.”
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As an undergraduate at Columbia, Gong was the editor-in-chief of 4×4 Magazine. He is the winner of the Paris Review’s George Plimpton Prize 2026.
Woodburn said: “I didn’t know ping-pong could be so fascinating, but Renny makes it so – revealing it at its most absurd and its most majestic, and treating it with a reverence that’s infectious. But this is a novel about so much more than ping-pong: it’s a brilliant depiction of boyhood and childhood loneliness, the euphoric highs and agonising lows of elite sport and a mother-son relationship full of love that’s spilling out in all the wrong directions. It’s hilarious and charming, but also heart-wrenchingly tender. I was never less than rapt, and I can’t wait to publish this exhilarating debut at Canongate.”
Gong commented: “When I was 11 years old, the summer after sixth grade, I went to a ping-pong academy in China. The boy in my book, though, is 12. You can see that I’ve fictionalised some things.”
