Tuesday, 19 August 2025 Books+Publishing @booksandpublishing
HarperCollins has acquired ANZ rights to Billie King, Outlaw, the debut novel by Shannon Kelly White, in a two-book deal via Anjanette Fennell at Key People Literary Management.
Billie King, Outlaw follows 12-year-old Billie King in 1918 as she searches for her missing mother, but gets ‘caught up in Australia’s last female bushranger’s quest for revenge’, said the publisher.
Based in regional Victoria, White has worked as a nurse and a food blogger. Her first cookbook Shannon’s Kitchen: Healthy Food You’ll Actually F**king Eat (Penguin) won both the health and nutrition and the food writing categories of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
HarperCollins head of fiction Catherine Milne said, ‘Billie King, Outlaw is kind of sui generis. It’s just so fresh, funny, tightly written and hugely entertaining. It’s the fiction equivalent of Girt by David Hunt, if you can imagine that. Or, imagine if Rosalie Ham rewrote Banjo Paterson’s The Wild Colonial Boy as The Wild Colonial Girl instead… or maybe: Jasper Jones meets Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, but fast, funny, foul mouthed and even more furious.’
White said, ‘Although I set out to write a story about a bushranger, a missing mother, and a girl ready to explode, in the end Billie King centres on the beauty and struggle of being a girl in a world built for hard men. It’s about fighting to keep your spirit, about laying your ears back and refusing to fit into the hole that’s been dug for you, about the miracle of mateship. I can’t wait to set it free.’
HarperCollins plans to publish Billie King, Outlaw in July 2026.
Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions