Monday, 21 July 2025 Books+Publishing @booksandpublishing
Pantera Press has acquired world rights for the memoir Juicy: How to Live a Life in the Wreckage of Expectation by debut Lebanese-Australian author Sheree Joseph, in a two-book deal facilitated by founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement Michael Mohammed Ahmad.
Joseph’s memoir will be ‘a rallying cry and a love letter to women who have had to start all over again’, said the publisher. ‘At 33 years old, Sheree Joseph found herself standing in the ruins of a future she thought she’d have: no partner, no children, no neat timeline. Instead, a pandemic, profound grief and the unsettling realisation that everything she’d been told to want – marriage, motherhood, security – might not arrive. Or, if it did, that it wouldn’t look like anything she’d imagined.’
Living on the unceded lands of the Wallumedegal and Darug peoples in Sydney’s North West, Joseph is an Arab-Australian writer and the former managing editor of The Vocal. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC, SBS, Overland, Russh, Junkee, the Lifted Brow and the Everywoman; her fiction has been published in Sweatshop Women (2020) and Love (2025).
Pantera publishing director Lex Hirst said, ‘Sheree Joseph is one of those once-in-a-lifetime voices to encounter; she somehow manages to clarify the complexity of this moment while also being gloriously true to her own singular experience. Juicy is a tender, personal work of art that makes you want to laugh-cry and live with wild abandon, and I can’t wait to share it.’
Joesph said, ‘With this story, I had one singular goal: to write the book I wish someone had handed me during my darkest days. It’s an offering to those who came before me and to anyone standing on a similar precipice. It’s the baby I didn’t get to have and the legacy that will live on beyond me.’
Pantera plans to release Juicy in late 2026.
Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions