Weidenfeld & Nicolson pre-empts Avigayl Sharp’s debut with six-figure US deal
Granta contributor Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel Offseason has been pre-empted by Weidenfeld & Nicolson along with a six-figure US deal.
Alexa von Hirschberg, publishing director at W&N, pre-empted UK & Commonwealth rights in a two-book deal from Rachel Clements at Abner Stein on behalf of Kent Wolf at Neon Literary. Offseason, the first book in the deal, will be published by W&N in May 2026. Animals After Dark, Sharp’s debut short story collection, will follow in 2028.
North American rights were simultaneously sold in a major two-book deal to Emily Bell at Astra House, as part of a six-figure deal.
“Offseason is narrated by a self-described ‘sexually frigid, spiritually sick and morally warped’ PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English,” W&N said.
“While manically lecturing her students about Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, she veers from her syllabus to highlight the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin, the impact of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union on her family, and the crucial distinctions between ephebophilia and paedophilia. Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma – real or imagined – of everyone around her, her quest to escape the past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.”
Continues...
Read More
Von Hirschberg said: “Prepare to meet your new literary obsession. Offseason is a wild, gleeful novel that has a dangerous and addictive velocity. Savage, hilarious and profound, it marks the arrival of a truly original literary talent. If you love Miranda July, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jen Beagin, Patricia Lockwood, Halle Butler or Miriam Toews, you will devour this novel. I simply can’t wait to introduce this daring and brilliant writer to readers.”
Sharp said: “I wrote Offseason to ask myself a series of obsessive and relentless and somewhat deranged questions about the not very nice ways the past – and the narratives we weave about it – lives on in the present. I’m beyond thrilled that it’s found such a wonderful home with Alexa and the incredible team at W&N.”
Sharp’s fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, New England Review and other publications, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She was the winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023-24 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She currently lives in Germany.
