“Manilla seeks to publish conversation-creators across genres”: The Bookseller reports on new Bonnier Books UK imprint Manilla

“Manilla seeks to publish conversation-creators across genres”: The Bookseller reports on new Bonnier Books UK imprint Manilla

“With a high-profile launch title in the form of climate change polemic The Future We Choose, Bonnier Books UK’s new, concise list Manilla is seeking to publish books that set the agenda.”

New Bonnier Books UK imprint Manilla is “intended to comprise just eight titles a year, spanning polemical writing, memoirs, popular science, social history and novels from voices around the world that ‘tell stories for our times’”, The Bookseller reports.

“We felt that with Manilla Press we could focus more on books that would create conversations, on wider issues.”

Kate Parkin, m.d. of adult trade, Bonnier Books UK

Kate Parkin, managing director for adult trade at Bonnier Books UK, says: “Zaffre is a general fiction list on which we have published books this year like Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppoand Stacey Halls’ The Familiars, so it is actually quite a broad church, but we did think we could offer some extra focus by putting books on a separate list. Meanwhile we are in the process of widening the range of our non-fiction. We felt that with Manilla Press we could focus more on books that would create conversations, on wider issues.”

“[Manilla’s] small scale means it can give books the focus and individual attention they need.”

Manilla will launch with a strong list of titles, including the “high-profile climate change polemic” The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Tom Rivett-Carnac, who was her political strategist at the UN, and worked with her in leading the negotations for the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The 2020 imprint launch will also see the publication of Sunday Times bestselling author Stacey Halls’ second novel, The Foundling, the paperback edition of Christy Lefteri’s powerful debut The Beekeeper of Aleppo, “gripping” untold Second World War story The Nine by Gwen Strauss, and a “very tender” debut novel, Charlotte, by South African writer Helen Moffet.

The full The Bookseller report can be read in the 11 October 2019 edition of the magazine.