UQP acquires debut novel from professional basketballer and AFLW recruit Saraid Taylor
UQP is delighted to announce that we have acquired a debut novel, Flinch, from Saraid Taylor, who won the 2022 Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and has a screenwriting degree from VCA. Saraid is also a professional athlete, recently drafted to the AFLW with the Richmond Tigers after six years in the WNBL.
Flinch is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of elite sport and its poisonous dynamics. Tarspen Davis is eighteen and navigating her first season in a professional basketball team when she meets Lo Carter. An established athlete, Lo is equal parts charming and selfish, and becomes a complicated mentor for Tarspen as she stumbles into a new glimmering world outside the stadium, of road trips and nightclubs and empty hotel rooms.
Meanwhile at home, Tarspen is grappling with the silent reformation of her family. She tries to balance the fragments of every relationship, even as each of her loved ones reels from their own secrets and prejudices.
UQP has acquired world rights and will publish late 2023/early 2024.
Saraid Taylor says:
‘I am honoured for my debut to be joining the calibre of novels published by UQP, and for the opportunity to develop it with Aviva Tuffield. It is a dream. There is no other way to describe it. I have not seen women’s sport represented in Australian adult fiction. I have not seen unflinching depictions of young women’s sexuality and identity – nor their collisions with ambition and other relationships. This novel is a chance to explore these complexities creatively through a love story. It is ultimately a celebration of nuance, while also examining forgiveness, memory, and how we transfer grief and find empathy.’
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘As soon as I started reading Flinch I was hooked. Saraid is a true writer and has something new and important to say: her novel is an insightful look at the culture of professional women’s sport – and team dynamics generally. It also shines a light on the toxicity that often emerges in elite-level sport, and how that plays into interpersonal relationships, questions of identity and gendered stereotypes. Sport is so central to Australian society but its role as a microcosm – and barometer – of wider social changes is so rarely examined, especially not in fiction.’
About Saraid Taylor
Saraid Taylor is a poet, screenwriter, novelist and athlete. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts (Screenwriting). For six years, she was signed as a development player to the Jayco franchise in the WNBL. She has now become a cross-code athlete, accepting a contract with the Richmond Tigers in the AFLW.
Saraid’s writing has twice been shortlisted in the Lord Mayor’s Writing Competitions, for both memoir and novella, and longlisted for a Kat Muscat Fellowship. In 2022 she won the Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Questions Writing Prize, and was shortlisted for the Djillong Short Story Competition, the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing, the Ada Cambridge Prose Prize and the Alan Marshall Short Story Award. Her portfolio can be found at: www.saraidtaylor.com. She lives on Wurundjeri land.
For more information please contact Louise Cornegé on louise.cornege@uqp.com.au or 07 3346 7932
