We’re thrilled to announce the latest addition to OWN IT! Agency: Speech Debelle, a musician, author, and chef.
Speech Debelle kicked in the music industry’s backdoor in 2009, with her debut album, Speech Therapy, which went on to win the Mercury Prize for British Debut Album of the Year.
She later tantalised the nation with her inventive recipes as a semi-finalist on Celebrity MasterChef, and in her weekly podcast ‘The Work Brunch’, where she cooked and discussed music, life and inspiration with a range of esteemed guests, such as Lianne La Havas, Nitin Sawhney, Shabaka Hutchings and Mikill Pane.
She accompanied her third album Tantil before I breathe with her own cookbook and memoir, expressing that ‘music and food are art – they heal and inspire’. The nine songs spanning all three of her albums tell a story of abandonment, the artistic process, and healing, with a delicious, inspired recipe for each.
Her fourth studio album, Sunday Dinner On A Monday, is set for a June 2023 release.
Body Story will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in April 2024, The Borough Press’ 10th anniversary year.
We’re thrilled to announce that Borough Press has snapped up the UK and Commonwealth rights to Rose Cartwright’s new revolutionary book, Body Story, a memoir that challenges the medicalisation of distress.
Body Story is evolving the conversation around the use of psychedelic therapy in medicine and has the potential to create revolutionary change in how we think, diagnose and treat people with mental health struggles, and Rose is perfectly placed to explore this.
Cartwright said: “Psychedelics broke open my heart, disrupted my stuckness and gave me my life back. I welcome their ‘renaissance’ but I’m concerned about psychedelic therapy being plugged into siloed and medicalised psychiatry, where brain is decontextualised from body. Present from past. Science from indigenous wisdom. Individual story from social story. The antidote is integration: bringing people and ideas together, and open-sourcing information. I’ve written this book in that spirit. I hope it offers a positive vision for what healing can mean, for anyone who feels stuck.”
Rose Cartwright is a screenwriter whose memoir, Pure, about her life with intrusive sexual thoughts, was adapted by Channel 4. Her writing about psychedelics, consciousness and mental health has been published in the Face, Vice andthe Guardian. She is currently adapting Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem (Head of Zeus) for Netflix.
About the book, Borough Press have said: “Body Story explores the potential for psychedelics and altered states of consciousness to disrupt how we think about suffering and healing. Through interviews with professionals and Rose’s own experiences in underground psychedelic therapy, the book will interrogate biological reductionism in psychiatry, exploring the ways disadvantaged groups suffer when social context is overlooked.”
Deputy Publishing Director, Ann Bissell added: “Rose Cartwright’s proposal blew me away. Body Story will challenge the existing narrative framework surrounding mental health diagnoses and propose holistic and radical new ways of understanding and treating mental health conditions. This is a book that we at Borough Press believe will disrupt and interrogate the dominant narrative and we hope will become the definitive conversation starter in mental health. Rose writes with breathtaking honesty and vulnerability and I’m so very proud to publish her.”
Today we’re excited to announce the latest addition to the OWN IT! Agency: Ben Newell, who’s work centres around the creation of micro-ecosystems called terrariums.
Ben is a content creator, influencer, public speaker, and owner of Worcester Terrariums. As a content creator and influencer, he has established himself as a leading figure in the field of terrarium building, amassing a total of 1.5 million followers across his social platforms. Ben has become well known for his short-form video content, with his videos totalling hundreds of millions of views.
As a public speaker, Ben has delivered demos and workshops across the UK including The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Greenrooms Market and the Colwall and Wyche Horticultural Society. Most recently, Ben has continued his work with Great Ormond Street Hospital where he hosted 21 demos and workshops as part of their involvement in the 2022 Bloomsbury Festival.
His work has attracted interest from local and national press, including being featured in The Spruce magazine, The Week Junior, Encyclopaedia Britannica, BBC News, Worcester News, UNILAD, LADbible and social media giants Buzzfeed where he created a series of educational videos for their platform.
Most notably, Ben won a gold medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2022 with The Plant Clinic and has been nominated for the Garden Media Guild Social Media Communicator of the Year Award 2022.
Today is the publication day of Selina Nwulu’s debut full-length poetry collection, A Little Resurrection. These poems are equally at home in the golden light of Senegal as they are in the harsh winds of Yorkshire. In these poems blackness itself is complicated, extending the resonances of being to reflect the self in a state of flux, a fugitive spirit battling the harm of erasure. There is a profound joy in these poems, all the more powerful for being hard-won. This book heralds the branching out of an important trajectory in Anglophone poetry.
