Wakefield Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of ANZ rights to Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens, winner of the 2024 South Australian Literary Awards Unpublished Manuscript Award. Lyn is represented by Alexandra Christie of Curtis Brown Australia.
Find out more about this exciting new novel below.
1836: As the world stands on the cusp of a new Victorian era, the liberated Clarissa FitzRoy travels to the colony of South Australia to confront the new Surveyor General, Colonel William Light, about her past. Seeking information about her family in India, Clarissa’s arrival in Australia disturbs Light, a man with his own repressed history who is haunted by his rejection of Clarissa years before. Over the course of several days on the rugged Australian coast, old sins are brought out of the shadows and it becomes clear that Clarissa herself is holding one final secret.
The judges of the Unpublished Manuscript Award write that Salt Upon the Water is a ‘lyrical and poetic historical fiction, which examines one of Australia’s founding figures in a new light. … The judges were particularly struck by the exploration of mixed-race identities, privilege and power in 19th century England and Australia.’
Lyn says,
‘I’m completely delighted to have been awarded the Arts SA Unpublished Manuscript Award. I’m a long-time admirer of Wakefield Press and I look forward to working with them to bring Salt Upon the Water out into the world. Fiction has a special power to open our minds to the complexity of human experiences, and historical fiction in particular can tell us a lot about how the past influences our present. It’s been fascinating to explore Colonel William Light’s eventful life in fictional form, and to think about how his little-known mixed race heritage shapes our understanding of Australian culture today.’
Wakefield Press editor Maddy Sexton says, ‘I am so pleased to be working with Lyn and Alexandra to bring Lyn’s incredible debut novel into the world. The novel engages with important themes – colonialism, mixed-race identities, racism – in a beautiful, almost magical way, drawing us into the complicated emotional centres of two deeply compelling characters.’
Publication of Salt Upon the Water is expected in September 2025.
Lyn Dickens is a prize-winning writer, editor, and academic living on unceded Kaurna land. Of mixed Singaporean Peranakan Chinese and Anglo Celtic Australian heritage, Lyn is the Managing Editor and Co-Founder of The Saltbush Review and she is a 2025 Caruso Writer-in-Residence at the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. Lyn has been shortlisted and longlisted for a variety of awards including the Deborah Cass Prize, the Lucy Cavendish Prize and the Richell Prize. In 2022 she was the winner of an Editorial Mentorship with Liminal x Writers SA and in 2021 she was awarded a Write It Fellowship with Penguin Random House. Her writing has been published in Australia, the UK, and the USA, appearing in journals such as Kill Your Darlings, ArtsHub, Liminal, and Mascara Literary Review. Her website can be found at: lyndickens.com