Canongate to Publish Several of Margaret Drabble's Classics as eBooks

Several of Margaret Drabble's best-loved titles will be published into eBook for the first time this May, alongside a campaign to promote digital reading to older readers.

Despite being hailed as one of Britain's finest novelists, awarded accolades including a CBE and the coveted Golden PEN, much of Dame Margaret Drabble's backlist has remained accessible only to print readers. This will change in May, when Canongate publish The Millstone, The Peppered Moth and Drabble's trilogy - The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory - into eBook for the first time.

In one of the first deals of its kind for Canongate, Louisa Joyner bought e-only rights from James Gill at United Agents. The five titles will be released in May, alongside a campaign led by Drabble to promote digital reading.

Drabble comments:

"I am delighted that these titles will be available digitally, as I am a keen e-reader, and my e-book is one of my most treasured possessions. It's a wonderful user-friendly and buyer-friendly invention, and has greatly increased my pleasure and ease in reading. I've become an addictive buyer. I'm very happy that more of my earlier books will now be easily available."

Says Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director, Fiction at Canongate:

"Working on Margaret Drabble's newest novel The Pure Gold Baby has been an utter joy. We have been bowled over by its extraordinary critical reception and we're absolutely thrilled that we're now able to bring a carefully selected group of her most famous works of fiction to a wider audience by releasing these titles in eBook. As one of our most celebrated novelists we're confident that not only will her fans be delighted to discover her electronically but that this is an exciting way to bring her oeuvre to an entirely new readership as well."

First published in 1965, The Millstone is Drabble's third novel and one of her most celebrated books, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.The Radiant Way, first published in 1987, explores the dawn of the Thatcher era from the vantage point of three women, and is the first in a trilogy examining the state of England in the 1980s that was continued in 1989 with A Natural Curiosity, and in 1991 with Gates of Ivory. The Peppered Moth, published ten years later in 2001, is an insightful exploration of the way we are shaped by our environment and ancestry, told through the story of one family across generations through the twentieth century.

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen highly acclaimed novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen and The Sea Lady. In 2013, she wroteThe Pure Gold Baby, her first novel for a decade and the book she said she'd never write. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.