{"id":76453,"date":"2025-08-18T22:43:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T22:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/76453\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T22:43:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T22:43:09","slug":"harpercollins-acquires-debut-novel-from-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/76453\/","title":{"rendered":"HarperCollins acquires debut novel from White"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\tTuesday, 19 August 2025 \u00a0 Books+Publishing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/booksandpublishing\/\" class=\"entry-social\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> @booksandpublishing<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Billie King, Outlaw\u00a0follows 12-year-old Billie King in 1918 as she searches for her missing mother, but gets \u2018caught up in Australia\u2019s last female bushranger\u2019s quest for revenge\u2019, said the publisher.<\/p>\n<p>Based in regional Victoria, White has worked as a nurse and a food blogger. Her first cookbook Shannon\u2019s Kitchen: Healthy Food You\u2019ll Actually F**king Eat\u00a0(Penguin) won both the health and nutrition and the food writing categories of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.<\/p>\n<p>HarperCollins head of fiction Catherine Milne said, \u2018Billie King, Outlaw is kind of sui generis. It\u2019s just so fresh, funny, tightly written and hugely entertaining.\u00a0 It\u2019s the fiction equivalent of Girt\u00a0by David Hunt, if you can imagine that. Or, imagine if Rosalie Ham rewrote Banjo Paterson\u2019s The Wild Colonial Boy as The Wild Colonial Girl instead\u2026 or maybe: Jasper Jones meets Leah Purcell\u2019s The Drover\u2019s Wife, but fast, funny, foul mouthed and even more furious.\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"text-align: justify\">White said, \u2018Although 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\u2019s about fighting to keep your spirit, about laying your ears back and refusing to fit into the hole that\u2019s been dug for you, about the miracle of mateship. I can\u2019t wait to set it free.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>HarperCollins plans to publish Billie King, Outlaw in July 2026.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"catlist\">Category: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.booksandpublishing.com.au\/?category_name=local-news\" class=\"catitem\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Local\u00a0news<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.booksandpublishing.com.au\/?category_name=rights-news\" class=\"catitem\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Rights\u00a0and\u00a0acquisitions<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<script async src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tuesday, 19 August 2025 \u00a0 Books+Publishing @booksandpublishing HarperCollins has acquired ANZ rights to Billie King, Outlaw, the debut&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1296,428,7579,7582,7575,7578,457,7581,5494,96,7577,620,7580,7576,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-76453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-asia-pacific","tag-australia","tag-author-interviews","tag-book-awards","tag-book-news","tag-book-reviews","tag-books","tag-bookseller-jobs","tag-ebooks","tag-entertainment","tag-library-news","tag-new-zealand","tag-publishing-jobs","tag-publishing-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}