Allen & Unwin acquires Ryan’s “Eleven”

Allen & Unwin (A&U) has acquired world rights to Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun by Christian Ryan.

The narrative nonfiction title about cricket is “a hugely creative work centred on 11 interconnected players of mystery, what-happened-theres and died-too-youngs, based on vast research and love for the game”, according to the publisher.

Ryan is a journalist and the author of Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket, which was voted Wisden’s “Best Cricket Book Ever” and won Cricket Book of the Year at the 2010 British Sports Book Awards.

Ryan said, “I wanted to write nonfiction that resists summarisation, and has in it loss and time, cricket, and energies that run in waves with the feeling I and the phenomenal people I met channelled into it.” He said it was exhilarating the book would have a life and readers when for “so many nights over years and years it felt like going no further than the end of the pencil”.

A&U commissioning editor Tom Bailey-Smith said the “much-anticipated, groundbreaking work of nonfiction” was “a totally different experience to the seminal Golden Boy, yet just as rewarding, giving more and more to the reader”.

A&U plans to publish Eleven in September 2026 and is co-publishing with Atlantic Books UK.