Announced in January, I’m excited to share this wonderful update! My client’s, Raksha Vasudevan’s, stunning critical nonfiction, Empires Between Us has been acquired by Graywolf and Knopf CA for publication in 2027. She is co-agented between myself and Transatlantic Literary Agency colleague, Amanda Orozco.
South Asian journalist Raksha Vasudevan’s EMPIRES BETWEEN US, a lyrical and urgent reckoning with estrangement and kinship by a former aid-worker as her assignments take her across Africa, going beyond a critique of “charity” to interrogate the desire for and limits of solidarity within colonial legacies of caste, exploitation, and whiteness, to Anni Liu (Graywolf Press), by Amanda Orozco and Noelle Falcis Math (World English ex. Canada). Canada rights to Hilary Lo (Knopf CA).
Born in India and raised in Canada, Raksha Vasudevan is an essayist, journalist and former aid worker. She has reported stories of environmental justice and the harms of economic “progress” for The New York Times, VICE, The Guardian, Outside, and High Country News, where she is also a contributing editor. Her essays and commentary on colonial legacy and family estrangement appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Hazlitt, and LitHub, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award and listed as “Notable” twice in Best American Essays.
Excerpts from Empires Between Us have received fellowships and grants from the Canada Council of the Arts, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, The Writer’s Room in Miami’s Betsy Hotel, and the Mountain Field Farm Residency in Alaska. Raksha has also received support and residencies from Ragdale, the Community of Writers Workshop in Squaw Valley, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and The African Writers Trust.
