Faber acquires ‘irresistible’ history of dolls from Otamere Guobadia
Faber has acquired Otamere Guobadia’s debut non-fiction work, a socio-cultural history of dolls. Publishing Director Hannah Knowles acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding audio, from Zoe Ross at United Agents. Faber will publish in Spring 2027.
In Idolatry: An Uncanny History of Dolls, Otamere Guobadia takes a socio-cultural look at dolls throughout history, featuring illuminating original research, along with interviews with doll aficionados like Mel Odom, veteran illustrator and creator of the iconic ‘Gene Marshall’ fashion doll, Lucya Starza, eclectic witch and practitioner of poppet magic, and the Design Museum’s Danielle Thom, curator of the recent Barbie®: The Exhibition. Additionally, he incorporates a broad church of voices and perspectives, from make-up and performance artists to collectors, enthusiasts, scientists, and Jungian psychologists.
With great style and a deep intellectual curiosity, Guobadia explores dolls’ universal presence in countries and cultures around the world, the love and loathing they provoke, the way these miniature likenesses both reflect and shape our image and the foundational role they play in our lives.
Knowles said:
‘I was obsessed by Idolatry from the get-go: a writer of Otamere’s elegance and thoughtfulness exploring the gloriously strange world of dolls was completely irresistible.’
Guobadia said:
‘Idolatry is both a history and a theory of dolls, seeking to answer the question of why, even in our modern and rationalist age, we cannot and will not put them down – how it might be that these seemingly simple objects that we create take on such a life of their own, making and unmaking us as much as we do them.’
Otamere Guobadia is a writer, poet and columnist whose work has appeared in British Vogue, i-D, Dazed, GQ, The Independent, The World of Interiors, AnOther Magazine, BBC and more.