Pink Shorts Press acquires Lara Day’s “Abakada”

Pink Shorts Press has acquired ANZ rights to Abakada, a memoir by Adelaide author Lara Day.

The publisher describes Abakada as “an alphabetical memoir of country hopping and linguistic longing”.

Day lives in Adelaide but grew up in Hong Kong with her Filipina mother and English father. She has lived across the world and “picked up languages as easily as she discarded them, while the two languages that felt like her birthright, Tagalog and Cantonese, eluded her”. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, Time and Travel + Leisure.

Day said, “I started writing Abakada to make sense of my family’s unplanned pandemic move from Hong Kong to Australia – we came for a holiday in 2020 and never went home. As the book grew, I found myself writing about my parents and (terrible) ex-boyfriends, motherhood, love, my Filipino and English lineages, colonialism and so-called rootlessness – and transforming the fractures of mixed identity into healing and integration.”

Publishers Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart said, “We at Pink Shorts love an unconventional structure, and Lara has well and truly delivered with Abakada, a brilliant memoir in alphabetical form […] Lara has turned her attention to long-form writing, combining the playfulness of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries with the identity searching of Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God. The result is a book that’s addictive, whip-smart and moving.”

Pink Shorts Press plans to publish Abakada in March 2027.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions