Salt Publishing has snapped up DJ Taylor’s new short story collection, Poppyland.
Director Christopher Hamilton-Emery acquired British and Commonwealth rights from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, and the book will be released in paperback on July 15, 2025.
Poppyland is Taylor’s second volume of short stories about Norfolk, after Stewkey Blues (Salt), which won the fiction category at the East Anglian Book Awards.
“The collection offers further reportage from his native Norfolk and brings together a cast of characters who are ordinary, exploited and irrevocably tied to the landscapes that shape them,” the summary states. “Most people in Poppyland watch their lives begin to blur at the edges. From late-opening taxi ranks, out-of-season holiday resorts and from tainted market stalls, they observe an environment that seems constantly out of balance, struggle for agency, make compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes – but only sometimes – take a decisive step that will change their fate.”
Taylor said: “I am delighted that Salt Poppyland after the great work they have done Stewkey Blues. Even more than the previous collection, it is an attempt to explore the ‘otherness’ of my homeland of Norfolk from the perspective of the people who live there and the travellers who try to navigate the very complex protocols.”
Hamilton-Emery added: “It’s wonderful to be working with David again – his mastery of the short story form is only matched by his uncanny ear for the dialect and rhythm of Norfolk. But above all he has an unfailing talent for revealing the gravity, the wit and the fragility of lives in this great old rural county.”
Taylor’s novels include English settlement (Vintage), which was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize, Transgression (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd) and Derby Day (Vintage), both of which were nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He has also written many non-fiction books, including Orwell: Life (Vintage), which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography in 2003, and Orwell: The New Life (Constable). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Taylor lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.
