Jupiter Nettle & The Seven Schools of Magic Sold At Auction To Viking

Sangu Mandanna and Pablo Ballesteros have a new middle-grade graphic novel nogether, Jupiter Nettle and the Seven Schools of Magic which follows a 12-year-old girl who has dreamed of learning magic her whole life, only to find that her new school isn’t as fun or rewarding as she hoped. Jupiter Nettle and the Seven Schools of Magic has been bought at auction by Jenny Bak at Viking and publication is for the spring of 2024.

Pablo Ballesteros is a Spanish illustrator, best known for “Las Fantásticas Hormiguets”, a series of children’s books for Beascoa, the Spanish publisher of Random House. Sangu Mandanna is an English writer, living in Norwich with the Celestial Trilogy novels, the Kiki Kallira series and an upcoming adult novel The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. She tweeted “I HAVE NEWS I’m SO excited about this story, and so lucky that the wildly talented Pablo Ballesteros is going to bring it to life! JUPITER has a shy, magic-loving, unlikely heroine, adorable magical creatures, seven magical schools, a wicked wizard. Bring on 2024!”

Sangu Mandanna’s agent Penny Moore at Aevitas Creative Management and Pablo Ballesteros’ agent Christy Ewers at the CAT Agency represented the pair. Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company now owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975. Viking publishes approximately 75 books a year. It has published both successful commercial fiction and acclaimed literary fiction and non-fiction, and its paperbacks are most often published by Penguin Books. Thao represents picture books and graphic novels by author-illustrators, Middle Grade fiction, and Young Adult across genres, as well as Science-Fiction/Fantasy and select Romance for adults.