Dialogue Books’ imprint Renegade snaps up Rachel Blackmore’s ‘outrageously evocative’ debut, COSTANZA

Credit: Nicolas Laborie

We are pleased to announce that CONSTANZA, Rachel Blackmore’s debut novel, has been snapped up by Renegade Books to be published as a super-lead title in August 2024. Rachel’s dazzling historical fiction, telling the forgotten story of Costanza Piccolomini, was acquired for the Dialogue Books imprint by Publisher Christina Demosthenous in a two-book deal, and translation rights have already been sold by Blake Friedmann in Italy and Brazil, as well as pre-empted in Spain.

COSTANZA brings to life the story of Costanza Piccolomini – a feminist icon who has been written out of history. Set in 1600’s Rome, it tells of Costanza’s intoxicating affair with Gianlorenzo Bernini – a famous sculptor who reigned over Roman society. Bernini wanted to possess Costanza not just in body and soul, but also in marble, creating a portrait which broke all rules of decorum and art. But in revealing Costanza in stone, she is exposed as his lover, marking the beginning of the end of their affair – and Costanza’s freedom… Within this tale of exhilarating desire, heady artistic pursuit and the most vicious of betrayals, is a story of control, violence against women and its devastating consequences. But above all, COSTANZA is a story of a remarkable woman who survives – and thrives – against the odds.

COSTANZA can now be pre-ordered here.

‘I couldn’t be more delighted that COSTANZA has found her home with Renegade,’ Rachel Blackmore says. ‘From the moment I heard Costanza’s story I knew I had to tell it. She was a phenomenal young, intelligent woman who found herself at the centre of a great Baroque scandal, yet all we have is Bernini’s version of events and her mute statue. I wanted to redress the balance; to prioritise Costanza’s narrative over that of her more powerful lover. Christina and the Renegade team have blown me away with their love, passion, and enthusiasm for Costanza, as well as their clear understanding of everything she represents.’

Publisher Christina Demosthenous added ‘in this dizzying, sultry and outrageously evocative book, Costanza finally steps out of the shadows of supreme sculptor, Gianlorenzo Bernini. This showstopping novel peels back the patriarchal mask that has cloaked this historical figure.  From the very first page, I was transported to the sun-drenched cobbles of Rome, and its darkness, danger, luxury and seediness. I’m in awe of Rachel’s talent, and I feel so lucky that I get to work on this special novel and introduce the world to COSTANZA – a true renegade.’ 

Rachel’s agent, Juliet Pickering says: ‘when COSTANZA landed in my inbox I was intrigued – I’m not usually a historical fiction reader, but the energy, humour and joy of Costanza’s voice blew me away, and I savoured the atmospheric, sensual setting. I can never resist a feminist icon, and Costanza was one of the most inspiring and resilient women I’ve come to know. I can’t wait for more people to meet and discover her!’

COSTANZA will be a flagship title for the brand-new imprint, Renegade.

Rome 1636. History calls her a Muse. Temptress. Fallen woman. This is her story.

In the scorched city of Rome, the cobbled streets hum with gossip and sin. Costanza Piccolomini is a respectable young wife – until she meets Gianlorenzo Bernini, the famed sculptor and star of Roman society, whose jet-black gaze matches his dark temper. From the second they set eyes upon each other, a fatal attraction is born.

Their secret love burns with a passion that consumes them. But with every stolen kiss and illicit tryst, Costanza’s reputation is at stake. Meanwhile, Bernini has a dangerous desire: he wants to make Costanza immortal. He vows to possess her not just in body and soul, but also in marble.

When Bernini unveils his sculpture of Costanza she is exposed as his lover, marking the undoing of their affair – and the beginning of a scandal which will rock Roman society. For Bernini would rather destroy Costanza than let her go.

Betrayed. Abandoned. Banished. This was meant to be the end of Costanza’s story. But Costanza is no ordinary woman: from the ashes, she will rise…

COSTANZA is a dizzying and sensual historical novel that brings to life a feminist icon who has been written out of history. This addictive tale of desire and betrayal is perfect for fans of THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT and THE MINIATURIST.

About Rachel Blackmore

Born in Birmingham the daughter of a theatre director and a teacher, Rachel developed her love of language and storytelling at a young age. She went on to study Early Modern History, before embarking on a career in politics which morphed into a long bout as a speechwriter – a craft she now teaches.

Rachel spent more than a decade working and raising a family, before taking a career break to write historical fiction about marginalised women, as a way of looking at contemporary issues.

In 2021 she was a runner up in Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition and won the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair in 2022.

She lives in London with her three teenagers, two cats and one dog.

Follow Rachel on Instagram and Twitter

Pan Macmillan SA to publish THE NEAR NORTH by Ivan Vladislavić

Photo: Minky Schlesinger

We are delighted that Pan Macmillan SA have acquired THE NEAR NORTH, the latest work from Ivan Vladislavić, for publication in Southern Africa in March 2024.

Terry Morris, MD of Pan Macmillan South Africa, says: ‘A new work by Ivan Vladislavić is always a momentous literary occasion. Pan Macmillan is honoured and thrilled to be publishing THE NEAR NORTH, which showcases Ivan at his inventive, lyrical and immersive best.’

Ivan Vladislavić says: ‘I am excited to be joining the Pan Macmillan fold. Picador Africa publishes some of my favourite writers and does so with skill and flair. Their Johannesburg shelf, which includes classics such as Dangor’s BITTER FRUIT and Van Wyk’s SHIRLEY, GOODNESS AND MERCY, keeps growing all the time. My work will be at home in this company and I look forward to a productive association.’

Ivan’s agent, Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann, adds: ‘It was a great pleasure to clinch this deal, seeing the passion for Ivan’s work from the team at Pan Macmillan SA. The Near North is a book of intense acuity and quiet power and will stand in excellent company on the Picador Africa list.’

Revolving around a writer in the city of Johannesburg in different states of lockdown, THE NEAR NORTH’s narrative traces his steps along the city’s streets, as he meets its ghosts and muses on found objects, journeying through eras and examining deep divides as he walks.

Wryly playful at times, fiercely serious at others, THE NEAR NORTH is kin to Vladislavić’s award-winning PORTRAIT WITH KEYS (which Geoff Dyer described as ‘one of the most ingenious love letters – full of violence, fear, humour and cunning – ever addressed to a city’), but is at the same time an entirely original and quietly intimate work of great power.

About Ivan Vladislavić

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels THE DISTANCE, THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET, THE EXPLODED VIEW and DOUBLE NEGATIVE, and the story collections 101 DETECTIVES and FLASHBACK HOTEL. In 2006, he published PORTRAIT WITH KEYS, a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/DOUBLE NEGATIVE, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book. His work has been published in 11 languages.

His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.

Visit Ivan's website

Praise for Ivan Vladislavić

‘Ivan Vladislavić occupies a place all of his own in the South African literary landscape: a versatile stylist and formal innovator whose work is nevertheless firmly rooted in contemporary urban life.’ – J.M. Coetzee

‘Vladislavić is among the top writers on the contemporary world stage.’ – Neel Mukherjee

‘Mysterious, lyrical and wickedly funny… Ivan Vladislavić is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him.’ – Katie Kitamura, BOMB Magazine

‘One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers’ – Ted Hodgkinson, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Ivan Vladislavić is certainly one of the most remarkable and versatile writers of our time’ – Thando Njovane, Africa in Words

Shani Akilah’s stunning short story collection FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS pre-empted by Oneworld

Photo credit: Jonathan Osibo

Fighting off a competing pre-empt, Oneworld has pre-empted UK and British Commonwealth rights to debut Black-British author Shani Akilah’s richly imagined short story collection FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS from Sian Ellis-Martin.

FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS will publish in June 2024 as a superlead title under Oneworld’s new book-club imprint, Magpie, underpinned by an extensive publicity and marketing campaign. A sampler of one of the stories will be available at Waterstones’ TikTok Festival later this month.

Partly set during the pandemic years, this collection brings to life the stories of Black-British Londoners as they navigate their way through relationships that break them, shape them, and sustain them through good times and bad. Linked to a central main character, they explore love and friendship, identity and community, loss and faith.

Shani Akilah says: ‘I'm absolutely delighted and honoured to have my debut short-story collection come to life with Oneworld. This journey has been a labour of love, and I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to be in the company of some of my favourite writers whose work has inspired me over the years.’

Juliet Mabey says: ‘Shani has brilliantly captured the Black-British and diasporic experience through a millennial lens, providing a fresh and contemporary spin on the challenges faced by a group of friends living in extraordinary times. Sitting at the literary-commercial sweet spot, it’s a stunning first outing for a writer of real strength and ambition.’

Sian Ellis-Martin says: ‘I’m thrilled that FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS has found a home with Juliet Mabey and the team at Oneworld. Shani’s beautifully crafted stories give an insight into the joys – and struggles – of the many variations of love and friendship and I can’t wait for readers to have the chance to enjoy them as much as I have.’

About Shani Akilah
Shani Akilah is a Black-British writer from South London of Caribbean heritage (Guyana, Barbados and Jamaica). She is an avid reader and book blogger and was spotlighted as a ‘Key Black Influencer’ by DoubleDay Books. Shani is passionate about community and bringing people together and is the co-founder of Nyah Network, a book club for black women and is also the founder of contributor based platform, Bankra, that explored the navigated identities of black millennials. Shani loves travelling, and has spent significant time in Ghana as part of her studies. Shani has a Masters degree in African Studies from Oxford University with research exploring counter-diasporic return and issues of home and belonging amongst second-generation British-Ghanaians.

Follow Shani on Twitter.

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THE MAN WHO LOVED CROCODILE TAMERS, A LIBRARY TO FLEE and MY THIRTY-MINUTE BAR MITZVAH longlisted for the South African Sunday Times Literary Awards

We are delighted that THE MAN WHO LOVED CROCODILE TAMERS by Finuala Dowling and A LIBRARY TO FLEE by Etienne van Heerden (translated by Henrietta Rose-Innes), have been longlisted for the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards in South Africa, in the fiction category, while MY THIRTY-MINUTE BAR MITZVAH by Denis Hirson has been longlisted in the non-fiction category.

The Sunday Times Literary Awards are awarded annually to writers who are either South African citizens or residents, and the fiction prize goes to a novel of ‘rare imagination and style’ which is ‘so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction’. Finuala Dowling’s last novel, OKAY OKAY OKAY, was also longlisted in 2021, and past winners include Blake Friedmann authors Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavić and Zakes Mda. The non-fiction prize is awarded to a book that demonstrates ‘compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity’, and has also been won by Blake Friedmann authors Ivan Vladislavić and the late Hugh Lewin.

Published by Kwela in March 2022, THE MAN WHO LOVED CROCODILE TAMERS is a daughter’s unforgettable portrait of a complex man. Gina knows hardly anything about her father apart from the fact that he was once engaged to Koringa, a crocodile tamer, and that he is buried in an unmarked grave. In between shifts at call centre, she works on a novel about him, in a narrative that is by turns enchanting, funny, and heartbreaking.

A LIBRARY TO FLEE, published by Tafelberg in September 2022, focuses on our dangerous, turbulent times: several stories are woven together while Cape Town’s mysterious crossbow killer prepares to strike again.

In MY THIRTY-MINUTE BAR MITZVAH, Denis Hirson looks back to his childhood in Johannesburg in the 1960s, to his relationship with his father, who was imprisoned for anti-Apartheid activism, and to his thirteenth birthday, when he visited his father in the car park of the prison. It was published by Jacana in South Africa in 2022, and will be published by Pushkin Press in the UK and US in 2024, with an audio edition from Tantor.

About Finuala Dowling

Photo: Simone Scholtz

Finuala Dowling is a prize-winning poet and novelist and an acclaimed poetry teacher. She lives in Kalk Bay, Cape Town.

Her first novel was WHAT POETS NEED, followed by FLYLEAF. HOME-MAKING FOR THE DOWN-AT-HEART won the M-Net Prize 2012 and was shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize in the same year. Her novel THE FETCH won the 2016 Herman Charles Bosman prize for English fiction. Her novel OKAY OKAY OKAY was published in South Africa by Kwela in 2019, with her latest novel, THE MAN WHO LOVED CROCODILE TAMERS, following in 2022.

Finuala Dowling on Poetry International

Finuala Dowling on Facebook

About Etienne van Heerden

Photo: Roger Sedres

Etienne van Heerden is the author of 28 published books, published in 12 languages and the winner of many major South African prizes. Van Heerden is an alumnus of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program and regularly teaches at universities in Europe. He has been writer-in-residence at the Leiden University in the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. His classic novel TOORBERG (ANCESTRAL VOICES) has recently been re-issued in Dutch by Aldo Manuzio.

Etienne van Heerden’s website

About Denis Hirson

Photo: Adine Sagalyn

Denis Hirson is a South African writer and lecturer now living in Paris. He is the author of seven books, almost all of them at the frontier between prose and poetry and concerned with the memory of South Africa at the time of apartheid. These include THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR TO AFRICA (David Philip), as well as, from Jacana: WE WALK STRAIGHT SO YOU BETTER GET OUT THE WAY, the best-selling I REMEMBER KING KONG (THE BOXER), the poetry collection GARDENING IN THE DARK; the novel THE DANCING AND THE DEATH ON LEMON STREET (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, 2012) and WHITE SCARS, a lyrical meditation on reading and its significance in our lives, runner-up for the South African Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Prize in 2007. His latest book, MY THIRTY-MINUTE BAR MITZVAH, was published by Jacana in South African in 2022, with Pushkin Press to publish in the UK and US in 2024.

About Henrietta Rose-Innes

Photo: Christine Fourie

Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of the novels SHARK'S EGG (SA: Kwela 2000) and THE ROCK ALPHABET (SA: Kwela 2004) and a collection of short stories, HOMING, which features the 2008 Caine Prize winning story ‘Poison’ and the 2010 Willesden Prize runner-up, ‘Falling’. Her novel NINEVEH was published by Random House SA’s Umuzi imprint in 2011 and by Gallic Books in 2016, and her latest novel, GREEN LION, was published by Umuzi in 2015 and by Gallic Books in 2017.

Follow Henrietta on Twitter