Saturday, October 05, 2013

Best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith to write new version of Jane Austen’s Emma


Fourth novel acquired for the Austen Project, which pairs contemporary writers with Jane Austen’s complete novels – to be published Autumn 2014

Alexander McCall Smith, best-known for the multi-million-selling The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, is today announced as the author of The Austen Project’s Emma. Emma will be the third book to be published as part of The Austen Project, which is teaming up authors of global literary significance to reimagine Jane Austen’s novels for a new generation of readers and Austen aficionados alike. The first book, Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, is published on 24 October, and will be followed by Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey in spring 2014.

Emma will be published by HarperCollins in autumn 2014, 199 years after Jane Austen’s Emma came out (and in paperback in 2015, to celebrate the bicentenary). Curtis Sittenfeld’s Pride and Prejudice will be published in autumn 2015.

Roger Cazalet, Associate Publisher of HarperFiction, has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Caroline Walsh at David Higham Associates.

J0anna Trollope, author of Sense and Sensibility, said:

"It's wonderful to hear that Alexander McCall Smith is going to take Emma on. Of all the great Austen heroines, she is the one who will benefit most from being, as it were, handled by a man, especially a man with such form in creating a heroine. I can't, personally, wait to see his take on this novel - and this heroine".

Alexander McCall Smith comments:

‘Writing a contemporary version of Emma is both a privilege and a real challenge. Not only is Emma one of the finest novels in the English language, but it is possibly Jane Austen's most thought-provoking and interesting book. I have already embarked on the writing of my new version, set in twenty-first century England, and have become thoroughly immersed in the story. Being asked to do this is like being asked to eat a box of delicious chocolates.’ 

Kate Elton, HarperFiction Publisher at HarperCollins, said:

‘We’re all absolutely thrilled to have signed up Alexander McCall Smith for Emma, and I’m sure he will bring new readers to Emma as well as delighting ardent Austen fans. The novels of Austen and McCall Smith share some essential qualities which make them enduringly popular with readers –gently poking fun at their characters’ ‘follies and inconsistencies’ as Austen would have it, and a sense that people can learn from this so that goodness wins out in the end – and it promises to be an amazing pairing.’



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