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Scribe has acquired Amadou by Man Booker International Prize–winning translator Jennifer Croft.

UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) were sold at auction to publisher Marika Webb-Pullman by Rachel Clements at Abner Stein, on behalf of Katie Grimm at Don Congdon Associates. US rights went to Daniel Loedel at Bloomsbury in a pre-empt, sold by Katie Grimm. 

Publishing in early 2024, Amadou is about a group of translators who gather at a villa in a primeval forest on the border between Poland and Europe’s last dictatorship, Belarus. Arriving from different nations, the translators have one thing in common: their adoration of Polish author Irina Rey, who has just completed her magnum opus. By tradition, the group will produce eight different versions of the novel together — but soon after they arrive, the author suddenly and mysteriously vanishes.

Acquiring publisher Webb-Pullman said of the book: ‘We’re thrilled to be publishing Amadou and taking Jennifer’s brilliant book to international audiences. It’s a bold, funny, inventive novel that’s both an insider’s view of the world of translation and an immensely satisfying literary mystery that also addresses climate change and the precarity of the world’s remaining wild places. We can’t wait to share it with readers in the UK and Australia.’

Jennifer Croft is a writer and translator who translates from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish. Her past work includes the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, and the translation of Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Man Booker International Prize. In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her fiction.