Canongate Announces Digital Debut of THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Canongate is to become the digital publisher of Muriel Spark's seminal novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as part of a nine book deal agreed by Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director of Fiction, with Georgia Glover at David Higham Associates on behalf of Muriel Spark's Estate.

The move makes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie available in e-book for the first time in the UK market, but also sees other beloved novels such as The Bachelors and The Finishing School make their debut digital publication. It marks a continued commitment from Canongate to making the best writing available in all formats, drawing upon their eBook publication of Drabble's The Millstone in 2014, and sees them collaborating with agents in new and exciting ways to ensure that authors and readers benefit.

Canongate will publish two of the eight titles straight into the Canons series: The Bachelors, named by Evelyn Waugh as 'the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark's clever and elegant books', will be released in December 2015. It will be followed in Spring 2016 by The Finishing School - a coming-of-age tale described by Ali Smith as 'a work of glittering Sparkian ice, whose thinly frozen surface tempts you to jump up and down jovially above something deeper and darker than Loch Ness... It is Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful'.

The other six novels, listed below, will be published as collections in two volumes for publication in 2016 and 2017. They join Spark's Complete Short Stories, which formed part of the inaugural Canons list in 2011, and a selection of audiobooks including The Driver's Seat, A Far Cry From Kensington and Memento Mori. The six novels are:

The Abbess of Crewe

Not to Disturb

The Only Problem

Robinson

The Takeover

Aiding and Abetting

Louisa Joyner says, "A colleague suggested that becoming Spark's publisher will secure my place in publishing heaven and that's certainly how it feels. It's a privilege to be publishing these fine, elegant and sparkling novels and to be seeing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in ebook for the first time in the UK is really exciting. A modern format for a thoroughly modern writer.'

Jenny Todd, Canongate Publisher, says, "Muriel Spark is every publisher's dream, and I couldn't be more delighted that Canongate is bringing her back home to Edinburgh with this exciting series of publications."

Spark's work is beloved of writers the world over. Her fans include Graham Greene, A N Wilson, John Updike, V S Naipaul, Andrew Motion, Ian Rankin, AS Byatt, Helen Dunmore and many many more.

Born in Edinburgh and educated in Scotland, alongside poetry and novels she also wrote children's books, radio plays, a comedy Doctors of Philosophy, and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures including Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë. Throughout her long and distinguished career she garnered international praise and many awards, which include the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature, the Gold Pen Award, the first Enlightenment Award and the Italia Prize for dramatic radio. She died in 2006.

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