UQP acquires adult non-fiction from award-winning children's author Nova Weetman
UQP is delighted to announce that we have acquired a nonfiction book from much-loved, award-winning children’s author Nova Weetman. Nova has published a number of middle-grade books with UQP including The Secrets We Keep, The Secrets We Share, Sick Bay, The Edge of Thirteen and most recently The Jammer. UQP will publish her as-yet untitled work in 2024.
Nova’s new book weaves together experiences of love and loss from throughout her life, including: the grief of losing her partner, playwright Aidan Fennessy, during the 2020 Covid lockdown; revisiting the death of her mother ten years earlier; her daughter turning 18; and her own physical ageing. Using these events as a focus, Nova considers how various kinds of losses change us and can become the catalysts for letting go.
This is a moving, honest and, at times, funny account of farewelling her partner of 26 years, parenting teenagers through grief, buying a flat for the first time at the age of 50, watching productions of Aidan’s plays after he is no longer here, and learning to appreciate spending hours alone with only the household cat for company.
Nova Weetman says:
‘When I was mourning my partner’s death, I read as many grief books as I could, desperate to connect with other people who had experienced the same. The more I read, the more I wanted to write about it myself, to laugh about the funny bits and cry about the rest. This book became the story of all that we lose as we grow and age. As a children’s writer, it’s both terrifying and exhilarating writing for adults, and I’m delighted to be working with Aviva Tuffield and UQP on my first adult book.’
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘I’ve been a huge Nova Weetman fan for a long time and am so excited that now – with a book for grown-ups – I get to work with her. Nova has such an engaging, funny and compassionate voice/style – her writing oozes empathy – and this nonfiction book showcases her talents to their full extent. It is warm and wise and devastating in equal measure, and she is unafraid to stare directly at the difficult times in life and pull out the lessons and the ironies. There is something for everyone in this new book, which focuses on the living we do after loss as much as anything.’
About Nova Weetman
She has written for TV and is the author of many middle grade and young adult novels. The Secrets We Keep was shortlisted for the Readings Children’s Book Prize, the Speech Pathology Book of the Year Awards, the ABIA Awards and Japan’s Sakura Medal. The sequel, The Secrets We Share, was a 2018 CBCA Notable Book and won the KROC Kids Reading Oz Choice Awards, NT – Best Fiction for Years 7 to 9. It was also shortlisted for the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Awards. Nova’s middle grade novel Sick Bay was a CBCA Notable Book, shortlisted for the ABIA Awards and Winner of the Yabba Awards Fiction for Years 7–9 in 2021. In 2022, The Edge of Thirteen won the ABIA for Small Publishers’ Children’s Book of the Year and was a CBCA Notable Book: Younger Readers. Her latest book is The Jammer, which is currently shortlisted for an ABIA Award for Book of the Year for Older Children.
For more information please contact Sally Wilson on sally.wilson@uqp.com.au or 07 3346 7932