UQP acquires dazzling debut novel by University of Sydney academic Dan Dixon

UQP acquires dazzling debut novel by University of Sydney academic Dan Dixon

UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired the debut novel from writer and academic Dan Dixon. The Department follows a narrator who, after witnessing the death of his father in a palliative care ward, finds himself trapped at an academic conference in a flooding hotel where he is coerced by a series of frantically self-interested scholars into delivering a keynote speech about his grief.

This accomplished debut is structured around six monologues delivered to the narrator by people he encounters, including an indiscreet therapist wondering whether he chose the wrong career, and an American professor bemoaning a research trip where a postgraduate student under his care lost the capacity to read and write. The Department is darkly funny, blending elements of realism with an atmosphere of surreal unease, with nods to campus novels, climate fiction and autofiction

UQP has acquired world rights and will publish in March 2027.

Dan Dixon says:

‘I have always loved novels about people losing their sense of reality as the world collapses around them. This book is about people who are becoming unlatched from experience, whether because they have lost someone they love, or because they are part of institutions that diminish their humanity, or because they are tempted by delusions of grandeur. I am grateful to Aviva Tuffield and the team at UQP for the care and generosity they have shown The Department as they help usher it into the world.’

Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:

‘The Department is a superb satire that riffs on the state of the humanities and the corporatisation of universities, interwoven with a story of personal grief as well as solastalgia, set as it is against the backdrop of the 2022 Brisbane floods. Dan Dixon’s novel of ideas is a rich and rewarding reading experience: thought-provoking, moving and deeply recognisable in its absurdity.’

About Dan Dixon

Dan Dixon is writer and academic with a PhD in English from the University of Sydney, where he is an Associate Lecturer in English and Writing. His writing has been published widely in outlets including the Sydney Review of Books, The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review, Meanjin and Overland. In 2020 he was awarded a Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, and in 2021 he was shortlisted for Overland’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. His academic monograph, Reading Relations: How Authors Enter Our Lives, will be published in December 2026 by the University of Iowa Press.