Pantera Press sells US rights to Courting Samira by Amal Awad

Pantera Press has sold World English rights (excluding ANZ) to Amal Awad’s Courting Samira to Gretchen Schmid at HarperVia, an imprint of Harper Collins dedicated to publishing extraordinary international voices in the USA.

Courting Samira is a romantic comedy starring a young Palestinian Australian woman and magazine assistant from a traditional-ish Muslim family who, after an endless parade of ‘doorknock appeals’ from underwhelming potential suitors and one too many days spent making coffee for a boss who doesn’t even know her name, is about to give up hope when she suddenly finds herself torn between two intriguing opportunities in both her professional life and her love life.

Gretchen Schmid said, ‘This novel absolutely charmed me. One of my goals at HarperVia is to publish more romance and joyful commercial fiction from outside the US, and Courting Samira is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’ve never read a rom-com with an Arab Muslim heroine before; so many novels published [in the US] that feature Arab women are about oppression…it would be a big step forward for us to be able to show that there is a wide range of experiences, and that people all over the world are the protagonists of their own love stories.’

Pantera Press acquired the rights to Courting Samira, along with This is How You Get Better, also by Awad, in 2019. The two novels were originally self-published in 2012 and were published by Pantera in 2021 following the release of Awad’s latest novel The Things We See in the Light.

Pantera Press will publish a new novel by Awad, Bitter & Sweet, in August 2023.

Amal is a writer, director and performer. As a journalist, she has contributed to such publications as The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, ELLE, Meanjin and Frankie, and has produced and presented for ABC Radio National. Amal is the author of eight books, including fiction titles The Things We See in The Light and non-fiction titles The Incidental Muslim, Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women, and In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra.

 

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For further information please contact Léa Antigny T: 02 8096 5192 E: lea.antigny@panterapress.com