Monument Books wins six-way auction for How to Be a Dissident
Monument Books, an imprint of 4th Estate, has won a six-publisher auction for How to Be a Dissident by journalist and author Gal Beckerman.
Publisher Kishani Widyaratna and editor-at-large Reni Eddo-Lodge acquired UK and Commonwealth volume rights, excluding Canada, from Beniamino Ambrosi of the Cheney Agency, on behalf of Adam Eaglin.
North American rights have sold to Amanda Cook at Crown, PRH, with further rights sales in Brazil (Rocco), Catalan (Laertes), France (Gallimard), Germany (Ullstein), Greece (Patakis), Holland (Balans), Italy (Einaudi), Korea (Across), Norway (Forlaget Press), Portugal (Presença), Spain (Critica) and Sweden (Polaris). The book will be published in the UK in June 2026.
Brooklyn-based Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas (Crown) and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which won the Sami Rohr Prize.
In How to Be a Dissident, he seeks role models who “push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and where social media misinforms.” Drawing on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, from Socrates to Ai Weiwei, and Hannah Arendt to Iris Murdoch, Beckerman “reveals the defining 10 characteristics these extraordinary figures share and how they might equip anyone navigating the pressures of modern tyranny.”
Widyaratna said: “In How to Be a Dissident, Gal Beckerman deploys his decades of journalistic experience to offer a humane, erudite, invigorating and inspiring guide to fighting back. Part philosophy, part history and part accessible, how-to guide for living with integrity in our age of authoritarian drift, How to Be a Dissident is the book we all need now. The whole team is proud to welcome Gal Beckerman to the list.”
Eddo-Lodge said the book “reminded me how to be brave.” “Through galvanising storytelling, it shows how change so often begins with people who act with courage and conscience before they know what their actions will set in motion,” she said.
Beckerman commented: “I’m so thrilled that my book will soon be in the hands of UK readers. We live at a moment when we need all the help we can get to push back against those forces in our world that seem to be flattening us. I hope this book, which is a very personal one, helps answer the questions that I had as well: how do I orient myself in these times, how should I behave, how should I respond? Thankfully I also found a publisher whose list and enthusiasm rhyme perfectly with my own.”
