The Kookaburra by Charlotte Guest pre-empted around the world

The debut novel by Charlotte Guest, The Kookaburra, has taken flight around the world in a series of local and international deals brokered by Rebecca Slater at a4 Literary.

The winner of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, The Kookaburra is the story of Diana who, 12 months after the death of her husband, finds herself “living an unmoored life” in her cottage in northeast Tasmania, when she takes in an injured Kookaburra.

Allen & Unwin acquired ANZ rights to The Kookaburra, in a 5-way auction, following the VPLAs announcement.

A&U acquiring publisher Alex Craig said: “I read Charlotte’s exquisite debut in one sitting and knew I had to publish it […] Charlotte has an extraordinary ability to encapsulate the big questions we have about the nature of our existence in prose that is note perfect, deeply moving, and at times, very funny. I cannot wait for readers to fall in love with this novel as I have.”

English language rights for The Kookaburra have since been pre-empted in major deals in the US to Carina Guiterman Simon & Schuster, and in the UK by Francesca Main at Phoenix.

In Europe, the book has sold in strong pre-empts to Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Germany, Ambo Anthos in The Netherlands, and Kegge in Norway.

Guest is a writer and bookseller on Wathaurong/Wadawurrung Country in Geelong. Her fiction and essays have been published in publications including Griffith Review, Island Magazine, the Weekend Australian, the Guardian, Overland and Kill Your Darlings.

She has won the Deakin Community Literary Award and the Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award and has been shortlisted for the Peter Carey Short Story Award and the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. In 2024, she was shortlisted for BookPeople’s Bookseller of the Year Award.

Guest received her PhD in creative writing in 2023 from Deakin and in 2025 was selected for a residential fellowship at Varuna, the National Writers’ House, where she completed her manuscript for The Kookaburra.