Book | This Is Not Who We Are
Author | Sophie Buchaillard
Publisher and Release Date | Seren Books, June 2022
Project Brief
For this debut, we wanted to ensure that the author made her mark on the literary scene. At the heart of the timely novel is a correspondence between a girl in a refugee camp in Rwanda and a girl in suburban Paris and the publisher briefed me to work with the author to find the talking points with the author so that we could pitch her appropriately.
Campaign
Because of the subject matter, I spent some time meeting with the author discussing what she felt comfortable talking about on the topic of the seeking of asylum in Britain. Sophie is French, so I also devised a strand to the campaign which capitalised on this aspect of her life in Wales.
Results
Byline Times were an early adopter of Sophie Buchaillard, commissioning her to write a long piece to contextualise the UK Government’s decision to deport seekers of asylum to Rwanda, while The Big Issue took the author’s Top 5 Books on migration. The Institute of Welsh Affairs commissioned an article for their magazine Agenda and elsewhere the author was interviewed for the French Morning in London outlet. The novel went on to be shortlisted in the fiction category of Wales Book of the Year in 2023.
