DEAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The87press acquires UK rights for TETRA NOVA
DALLAS, TX — Deep Vellum is excited to announce the87press’s UK acquisition of Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova. Through arrangement with Deep Vellum's Rights Director, Sarah McEachern, and the87press’s Founding Director, Azad Ashim Sharma, Tetra Nova is slated to be released in the UK and Ireland in December 2025.
“In March 2025 at AWP during a reading curated by Susan Nguyen, I had the great pleasure of watching a performance by Sophia Terazawa of her new novel Tetra Nova,” says Azad Ashim Sharma, founding director of the87press. “Given the strong thread of performance work and avant-garde literature on the87press' growing catalogue, I immediately knew I had found a gem. Partnering with Deep Vellum adds another valence to our community building as a leading UK based independent publisher with an increasingly international remit and reputation and I look forward to seeing our readers engage with Terazawa's work which will be released in the UK and Ireland in December 2025.“
Sharma continues: “Terazawa is one of two novels we will be publishing this year and we are simply thrilled to bring this innovative and brilliant work that deepens our engagement with the legacies of colonial violence as we strive to find collective resistance to its contemporary expressions… I have the greatest admiration for the work of Deep Vellum and our other US partner publishing houses who continue to do vital work in furthering literary culture in a time of such gross negligence and oppression against the written word and with that, I look forward to bringing more books to readers in collaboration.”
The operatic text of Tetra Nova begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.
Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.
At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of two poetry collections with Deep Vellum, Winter Phoenix and Anon, along with two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press), a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest, and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She's a graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA program, where she also served as Poetry Editor of Sonora Review. She currently teaches at Virginia Tech. Tetra Nova is her first novel.
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013 in Dallas, TX, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.
Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays. Additionally, we offer educational and creative workshops, industry leading live events, and regular commissioned work with online journal of culture theHythe. Committed to equity, all authors receive fair contracts regardless of their background. As part of Arts Council England's National Portfolio, we contribute to the Let's Create project and look forward to fostering inclusive learning spaces as the only NPO in the London Borough of Sutton.