Roehampton doctoral student wins US publishing deal with first novel

  • Tuesday, November 16, 2021
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Writer Hannah Levene, a fourth year PhD student in Roehampton's School of Humanities and Social Sciences, has secured a deal with Nightboat Books in New York for her first novel Greasepaint. Set against a backdrop of 1950s America, Greasepaint follows a group of all singing, all dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists on their Friday nights out and about in New York. Hannah was drawn to fifties America by the period's style, but Greasepaint is not a period piece, nor is it necessarily historically correct, rather it's an experimental romp into new butch literature.

Hannah did her undergraduate degree in creative writing at Falmouth followed by an MA Gender, Sexuality and Culture from Birkbeck. Choosing Roehampton for her doctorate, Hannah has focused her research on new butch literature with supervision from Professor Peter Jaeger and Dr Isabel Waidner. She submitted the manuscript of Greasepaint to Nighboat Books in June this year, knowing it to be an unconvential press for "writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries" and by mid-November they confirmed a publication date for 2023. On receiving the news Hannah commented "It's exciting to know that as my postgraduate studies come to an end, Greasepaint will go on to live a life of its own! And it's especially gratifying that it will be published by Nightboat Books, whose outlook on writing and publishing aligns with my own."