Deal News: Chanel Sutherland’s LAYAWAY CHILD acquired by Shirarose Wilensky at House of Anansi, for publication in spring 2026. Chanel is represented by Marilyn Biderman.
We are thrilled to announce that Chanel Sutherland’s LAYAWAY CHILD, a collection of interwoven short stories that examines the lives of mothers working as domestic housekeepers and the children they left behind in intimate communities on lush Caribbean islands, where their grandparents raised them, and the experiences of these children once transplanted from the Caribbean to Canada, has been sold to Shirarose Wilensky at House of Anansi, for publication in Spring 2026 by Marilyn Biderman at Transatlantic Literary Agency
Chanel Sutherland won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize for “Beneath the Softness of Snow,” which opens the collection. She also received the Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship Award, and was longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Chanel was also named on the CBC’s 30 Canadian Writers to Watch in 2022. Born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Chanel moved to Montreal when she was ten. She holds a BA in English Literature from Concordia University. She is working on her first novel, currently titled Sleeping in Tall Cotton, which is set in a Caribbean village and involves the rape of a child by a foreign white man, and elements of Caribbean folklore.
Congratulations Chanel!