In a first for the imprint, Andersen Press has signed a “visceral” and “astonishing” collection of YA poetry from performance poet Nyanda Foday.
Publishing director Charlie Sheppard acquired world rights directly from Foday. Somehow, Somehow will be published in September 2024 and will be supported by a “major” campaign and a “significant” marketing spend. Andersen Press aim to launch Foday as rising voice in young adult poetry.
Across 30 “urgent and powerful” poems, Foday explores the issues and events she experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than return home to her family in lockdown, Foday remained in student accommodation at her university and spent 79 days alone, trying to study for her degree. Somehow, Somehow is pitched as a “visceral, astonishing” collection that explores an “unprecedented moment in global history”.
“There was something so incredibly painful and personal about the poem I heard Nyanda perform, I just couldn’t turn away,” said Sheppard. “I wanted to share and save for posterity her take on this moment in time that changed so many lives. The result is a powerful collection that captures candidly a part of our recent history. Whether this was your experience of the pandemic or not, it is important that we all appreciate how it affected others and try to create something beautiful from that.”
Foday added: “I feel like there was such a rush to have the pandemic behind us that we didn’t get to process it, to really sit with how scary it was—the feeling of genuinely not knowing what the world was going to look like week-to-week at certain points.
“All my poetry is incredibly personal, but Somehow, Somehow takes that to a new level. I’ve been told that it is, at times, a painful read, and I hope that it’s the kind of pain you feel when you finally let yourself acknowledge past hurt. I hope that it brings validation to others who struggled a lot and had to suddenly pretend that nothing had changed.”
