Wakefield Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of world rights to award-winning Adelaide author Andrew Roff’s debut novel via Martin Shaw of Shaw Literary. Publication of the novel, provisionally titled Pangea, is expected in March 2025.

Read more about this exciting acquisition below.

Pangea is a blistering literary/speculative novel that blurs the line between technology and reality. Set in a near-future Australia where unemployment is the norm, the government is fractured, and the people are angry, Pangea explores purpose and deceit, and the unprecedented challenges of a world our children have already started to inhabit.

It’s 2058 and Maggie has just landed her dream job as a coveted policy advisor in Canberra. Filled with ambition, yet wary about her sudden promotion, Maggie lobbies for a universal income that might just bring half of the population, stricken jobless through automation, out of poverty and into a purposeful life.

As she fights for her vision of a just society, overcoming manipulative politicians, public shaming, religious fundamentalists and foreign powers, Maggie must make an almost impossible decision about the kind of future she wants for herself, and for Australia. 

Wakefield Press editor Maddy Sexton says, ‘I’m excited to work with Andrew on this inventive and exciting new novel. While the story itself is concerned with the political machinations of a farcical government, at its core are the fully realised characters who inhabit this strange new world.’

This story has been years in the making for Andrew. ‘I started writing Pangea as an expectant father-to-be, trying to imagine what life might be like for the next generation when they come of age. My eldest daughter has just turned six, and the future that I conceived of as decades away seems to be arriving faster than any of us could have anticipated.’

‘I am thrilled to be working again with the team at Wakefield Press, and to find an editor in Maddy who shares my passion for this project. I believe that fiction can inspire us to think about the tomorrows we want to build for ourselves, and I’ve always been drawn to Australian writers who attempt to sketch our future national history.’

Andrew’s short fiction and non-fiction has appeared widely, including in The Guardian, Meanjin, Island, Overland, Southerly, Westerly, Griffith Review and Going Down Swinging. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, for an unpublished crime novel.

Andrew lives on the unceded Country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains.