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Hurst has signed a “courageous” and “unflinching” memoir about the personal cost of war correspondence by award-winning journalist Anjan Sundaram.
Michael Dwyer, publisher and managing director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada and South Asia) from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. Breakup will be published in May 2023.
The synopsis reads: “After 10 years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world.”
Sundaram said: “I’m honoured Breakup will be published in Hurst’s catalogue of great thinkers and writers addressing the major issues of our day. For a decade, I’ve looked to Hurst for nuanced perspectives on the events shaping contemporary global history. I’m delighted to share my personal exploration of the Central African Republic with their eminent network of writers and institutions in the UK, Africa, Asia and beyond.”
Dwyer described the book as “ the most convincing reportage of contemporary Africa I have read in a long time.”
“In Breakup you learn what has happened to an almost entirely overlooked African country in the past 10 years and how its precarity is now an established daily fact of life, along with unpredictable and ghastly violence on a huge scale. Anjan Sundaram is a writer I have long admired, one whose prose is redolent of Ryszard Kapuściński, and I’m thrilled to be publishing him,” he said.