Wakefield Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of world rights to the debut collection by Adelaide author Andrew Roff, winner of last year’s Peter Carey Short Story Award, via agent Martin Shaw of Shaw Literary. Publication of the collection, provisionally titled Third Heaven, is projected for 2022.
Jo Case, associate publisher at Wakefield Press, compares Roff’s collection to Matthew Baker’s Why Visit America, in the way its stories play with ideas through fully realised characters and worlds, with an often-sardonic voice that is also intensely affecting. ‘The experimentation in these stories never feels forced, but instead masterfully complements the mood or theme of the story. That’s a deceptively tough balance to strike.’
Roff’s stories have been published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, Overland, Island, Going Down Swinging and more. He was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2016.
‘I am thrilled to be working with Wakefield Press – an independent publisher from my home state of South Australia – on my first short-story collection,’ says Roff. ‘Right from the start, it’s been clear that Jo and the team at Wakefield have really connected with these stories. With their help, I can’t wait to start editing and organising a final version for publication.’
Roff’s daring, irreverent collection dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own. A corporate satire follows a pair of dark operatives working for a chicken franchise as they take careful revenge on counterfeiters. One story told in code, as a coder calculates the odds of her husband’s cold developing complications and killing him, is reminiscent of Jennifer Egan. A relationship at breaking point is told via a scrambled timeline of events that works like a puzzle. A man spends his inheritance on technology that will allow him to fly. And an archeologist working for mining companies against the interests of Indigenous communities develops a mysterious psychological condition that causes her to black out and commit extreme acts of generosity.
Case says she worked closely with Shaw at Melbourne bookshop Readings for many years, where she admired his gift for spotting major new Australian talent well ahead of the pack. ‘It’s great to be working with Martin again, benefiting from his eye for writing talent.’
Roff is a fan of recently published offbeat, experimental short-story collections by Australian writers like Wayne Marshall, Elizabeth Tan, Ben Walter and Ryan O’Neill. ‘Now, as a writer, I am looking forward to contributing to that trend in my own small way, he says. ‘Some of these stories have been telling themselves to me, shifting and re-forming, for close to a decade. I can’t wait to set them loose in the world.’