UQP acquires new novel from Angela O’Keeffe
UQP is delighted to announce that we have acquired Angela O’Keeffe’s new novel, The Sitter, from Shaw Literary. Angela’s debut was Night Blue (written in part in the voice of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and for the UTS Glenda Adams Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Sitter is a startlingly accomplished and multilayered work about a woman writing a novel based on Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the celebrated painter. As the two women start to connect in unexpected ways, the balance between writer and subject shifts, and the parallels between their lives come into focus: the limitations of their gender, the need to reclaim one’s own story and the sacrifices made for art.
Confined to a hotel room in Paris at the start of the pandemic, the author finds herself writing another novel entirely, one based on a devastating event in her own past.
UQP has acquired world rights from Shaw Literary and will publish in August 2023.
Angela O’Keeffe says:
‘I’m very happy to be working with Aviva Tuffield and UQP to present The Sitter to readers. To me The Sitter is an unusual love story between two women from different centuries. The inspiration for the novel came from when I was in Paris in 2017 and saw an exhibition of Cezanne’s portraits, and I began reading about Cezanne and Hortense. I knew that the two main characters were going to be stuck in a hotel in Paris, but I couldn’t find a plausible reason for them to be stuck there. Then the pandemic came, and the plausible reason landed in my lap.’
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘We learnt from Angela O’Keeffe’s debut, Night Blue, that she’s a writer who takes risks and is willing to challenge herself and the reader. Exactly the same can be said of The Sitter, which focuses on two women a century apart sharing stories of their lives in a hotel room in Paris at the start of the pandemic. Are you intrigued? You should be. This is a short novel that packs a punch. Profound, thought-provoking and with echoes of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, The Sitter will leave no reader unmoved. It is a privilege to be working with a writer of Angela’s calibre.’
About Angela O’Keeffe
Angela O’Keeffe’s first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. She grew up in rural Queensland, has a Master of Arts in Writing from UTS and lives in Sydney.
