UQP has acquired world rights to Suri Matondkar's 'Cheatercock'
UQP is delighted to announce the acquisition of world rights to Suri Matondkar’s Cheatercock: On the Ownership of English and Other Lies I’ve Been Sold, the inaugural winner of the UQP Mentorship for Under-represented Writers.
In this wonderfully inventive blend of sharp critique and candid memoir, Matondkar uses the fraught position of the international student to embark on a rich and revealing exploration of language, power and identity.
Matondkar’s love of the rhythms and writers of the English language brought her to study in Australia. Here, she found English used as a tool of oppression, in tests of her ‘correct’ usage, but also as a means of liberation, as she discovered ways to articulate her depression, sexuality, trauma, even love, which had remained unspoken in her native Goa. The connective power of Taylor Swift’s lyrics also plays a role. Alive with intelligence, anger and humour, Cheatercock is a vivid, affecting portrait of the reasons someone might need to make a new home, and why they might need to find new words to express who they are.
Author Suri Matondkar says:
I am so joyful that my experimental little book has found a home. This book was written during a time when every moment felt temporary and to have it become permanent in this way is a very lovely feeling. All my gratitude to the judges of the 2025 UQP mentorship prize for this life-changing opportunity, and all my thanks to my publisher Ben Ball for his support of this work and for letting me use one of my favourite Indian English words as a title.
Publishing Director Ben Ball says:
Cheatercock calls to mind the work of Aravind Adiga, Nam Le, Sarah Malik and Michelle de Kretser – a searing, funny, revealing challenge to our assumptions about who controls language, to what end and at what cost. It introduces a penetrating and endlessly readable literary intelligence.
Cheatercock: On the Ownership of English and Other Lies I've Been Sold will be published in July 2027.
