Literary Agent Emma Bal sold UK & Commonwealth rights in Catastrophe Foretold by Nikki Ikani in a six-figure pre-empt to Greg Clowes at Viking/PRH, and North American rights to Claire Wachtel at Union Square in a six-figure deal at auction.
German rights were sold to Piper after a four-way auction; Dutch rights to Hollands Diep at auction; French rights to Albin Michel in a pre-empt, Italian rights to Mondadori in a pre-empt; and Hungarian rights to Agave in a pre-empt.
Nikki Ikani’s Catastrophe Foretold is a genre-opening book about catastrophes from a world-leading expert in crisis warnings who writes gripping human stories of unequalled power and poignancy. The book looks at ten catastrophes from the last century, from the torpedoing of the Lusitania to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the California wildfires, and examines what happened in the minutes, hours and days preceding them – and what could have been done differently. Through these unbelievably powerful stories, she builds a new framework for understanding catastrophe which transcends time and place: cognitive drag, power plays, manufactured doubt and the silo effect.
The result is a book about our very human inability to deal with catastrophes – how we consistently look away from inconvenient truths – as well as how the memory of each catastrophe is often manipulated to suit the powerful. But crucially this book will end on a message of hope. As Ikani says: ‘Our societies contain profound wisdom if only we would listen.’ And by deliberately lingering in the liminal moment before the fall, Ikani offers us something traditional disaster accounts cannot: a chance to stand on the precipice and see a completely different path into the future.
In its narrative flair, Catastrophe Foretold will earn its place on the shelf alongside disaster classics like Hiroshima by John Hersey, as well more recent additions to the genre like Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen and Challenger by Adam Higginbotham. It also has the big-picture thinking of Collapse by Jared Diamond, Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson and Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp, plus the on-the-ground immediacy of When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope.
Nikki Ikani is Assistant Professor of Intelligence and Security at Leiden University, a Research Fellow at King’s College London and a published poet. She is an expert in crisis anticipation and early warning, with a focus on identifying the warnings that precede disaster. She has delivered briefings to Dutch, UK, EU and French government agencies. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, EU Observer, NRC, The Ukrainian Week, Euractiv, EenVandaag, and she recently presented her research on warning and crisis at the NATO Summit Public Forum in The Hague. A published poet and managing editor of Poets Reading the News, Ikani is also a writer at the Dutch collective Kortschrijvers, which publishes daily 140-character microstories. This blend of scholarship and literary writing allows her to turn complex global events into stories that resonate deeply with readers.
Nikki Ikani says: ‘For years I’ve researched crisis and warning, fascinated by the moments on the cusp of disaster, when the signs are visible but the future still unsettled. To write about that threshold is to ask how we live with foreknowledge, and what is at stake when we fail to act. I’m thrilled to be working with Greg Clowes and the team at Viking to bring readers into that world on the brink, and I’m deeply grateful to Emma Bal at the Madeleine Milburn Agency, whose early belief in this book made it possible. I hope readers come away with the recognition that catastrophe is not always inevitable, that there are moments when listening closely might still alter the course ahead.’
Catastrophe Foretold will be a lead title for Viking Penguin General and Union Square in Spring 2028.
