Publishers Weekly - October 30, 2017

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12 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 30, 2017

What a difference a decade or so makes. Not so long ago—2004, to be exact— journalist and author David Marr wrote that his main impression of judging that year’s Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, was “how very little good writing there is.” He noted that Australia’s already-small market for literary fiction was shrinking and that Australian outposts of multinational publishers were cutting back on fiction and ignoring unsolicited submissions.

No longer. Over the past couple of years, Australia has hatched a raft of authors whose work is selling around the globe. Hannah Kent, Liane Moriarty, Graeme Simsion, and, most recently, Jane Harper are now global exports. Harper’s debut, The Dry (Flatiron), which arrived in U.S. bookstores in January with a Reese Witherspoon movie option and glowing praise attached, has sold in 29 territories and has worldwide sales of more than 420,000 copies. (Sales in the U.S. are more than 26,000 copies to date, according to NPD BookScan.) Moriarty, of course, hit the bestseller lists in the U.S. with Big Little Lies, which has sold more than 565,000 copies in trade paperback since it was released two years ago and more than 260,000 copies this year, helped by the HBO miniseries adaptation.

“Australia has long had a large and
talented pool of writers, and it’s only now
the rest of the world is getting to dis-
cover them in large numbers,” said Fiona
Inglis, managing director of Curtis
Brown Australia, whose clients include
Harper. “We currently have a thriving
retail market, specifically in the indepen-
dent sector, and lots of those booksellers
have helped to build homegrown authors’
New York agent Dan Lazar of Writers’
House concurs. He first went to Australia
four years ago as a guest of the Visiting
International Publishers program—
organized by the Australia Arts Council
to turn publishers, scouts, and agents on
to local talent. He has since been back
twice on his own dime and closed a
number of sales for Australian authors in
the U.S. and in some other countries.

Through contacts with small publishers
like Midnight Sun, he picked up Black
Rock, White City by A.S. Patric. He found
An Ordinary Epidemic by Amanda Hickie
while browsing in a bookshop in the
Crow’s Nest area of Sydney. Lazar went
on to sell the latter to Little, Brown in a
six-figure preempt. (It was published in
the U.S. in March as Before This Is Over.)
As a nation, Australia has often seemed
caught between the polarities of the
Anglophone world, Britain and America
each jostling for bandwidth and shelf
space. This has left Australians fre-
quently looking outward for entertain-
ment. Nevertheless, the country has a
long tradition of producing
bestselling, and award-win-
ning, fiction by authors such
as Peter Carey (winner of two
Booker Prizes), Bryce
Courtenay, Richard Flanagan
(winner of a Booker Prize), Di
Morrisey, Christos Tsiolkas,
and Markus Zusak.

Andrea Hanke, editor in chief at Books + Publishing, a leading Australian trade magazines about the publishing industry, believes recent media coverage of authors such as Harper and Kent “has helped to build a buzz around Like Hanke, Alice Lutyens, one of Curtis Brown’s agents, sees what’s happening with Australia writers as less a trend than a happy coincidence. “We were fortunate to see a cluster of great writing emerge within a small time frame,” Lutyens said. She saw an opening chapter of The Dry and, she said, immediately wanted to read the finished novel. “What [sets Harper apart] is her writing. It’s so taut. It’s like a new violin string.” She also believes another factor is at play: competition driving buyers to care less about an author’s provenance and more