NewSouth acquires Kale’s debut

NewSouth Publishing has acquired world rights to Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation, the debut literary nonfiction work by writer and cultural critic Neha Kale.

Kale migrated from India to outer-suburban Perth as a child, but “an ancestral home, a colonial house in Goa, linger[ed] in her memory,” said the publisher. “Mixing personal narrative with art and cultural criticism, Foreign Return explores the myth of the suburbs, colonial legacies, what it means to migrate to a stolen land, and changing ways we will need to conceive of homes and their ownership.”

Kale is editor-at-large of Art Guide Australia. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, the ABC, Griffith Review, the Saturday Paper and elsewhere. She is former editor of VAULT magazine and has been recognised with a Faber Scholarship for creative nonfiction, a Create NSW literature grant and residencies at Varuna and Bundano.

Kale said, “When I migrated from India to Australia as a young girl, I internalised the idea that there were only two paths laid out for me if I was to ‘belong’ to a culture in which people like me were simultaneously celebrated as part of a national project and framed as an invasive species that threatened a finite set of resources.

“During a time of rising anti-migrant sentiment, I wanted to think beyond the West’s reductive narratives and search for other ideas of what home could mean.”

NewSouth publisher Harriet McInerney said, “In the midst of a housing crisis, this mesmerising literary exploration of home offers a generous and generative exploration of how we make our homes and the power of art to help us reimagine these intimate spaces.”

Foreign Return is set to be published by NewSouth in August 2026.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions