It’s good at last to be able to write this: Alex Payne has signed my book, The Blue Plateau, to UQP (the University of Queensland Press), and the book will appear in May 2009.

We’ll launch it at the Sydney Writers Festival, my home festival, and there’ll be an event or two, connected with the SWF, in the Blue Mountains, the landscape of the book itself.

UQP have published some fine poets and fiction writers (among them Peter Carey, Sam Wagan-Watson, Tara June Winch, David Malouf, David Brooks, and Kate Grenville), and lately they are designing the most elegant books in the country, so I know they’ll make my book the loveliest thing it can be. The rest is up to me and my words.

Milkweed Editions have decided to bring the North American publication of the book forward to May as well. So bring on the month of May.