Transit Lounge acquires Ouston’s Mine

Transit Lounge has acquired ANZ rights to author Adam Ouston’s second novel, Mine, via Martin Shaw at Shaw Literary.

According to Shaw, Mine has been composed in one complete sentence. The novel follows ‘a poet, academic and activist in his seventies’ trapped at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Tasmania.

Ouston (Waypoints, Puncher & Wattmann) is a musician, bookseller, and writer living in Tasmania. Ouston’s writing has won 2014 Erica Bell Literary Award and the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

Transit Lounge publisher Barry Scott said: ‘Adam Ouston’s Mine is a stunning and haunting novel, at once a story of environmental vandalism and exploitation as well as a celebration of Tasmania’s unique if threatened place in a world spinning out of control. The protagonist and narrator has spent his life exploring the ghost towns that were once teeming mining settlements, and what he reveals from an old mine, in which he finds himself trapped, transfixed me as a reader.’

Discussing the acquisition, Ouston said: ‘I’m thrilled Mine has found a home at Transit Lounge – an independent press that punches well above its weight with an inspired and inspiring pedigree.’

Transit Lounge plans to release Mine in August 2026.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions