Alpana Sajip, Senior Commissioning Editor at Picador, has pre-empted UK & Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Carrie Plitt at Felicity Bryan Associates on behalf of Alexander Kane at Calligraph Literary, to UNDERWORLD: Fear, Greed and Empire in the Deepest Gold Mines on Earth, by Kimon de Greef. Picador will co-publish in hardback, ebook and audio with Pan Macmillan South Africa. North American rights were acquired by Chris Howard-Woods at Doubleday.

Deep below the South African city of Welkom lies a cluster of abandoned gold mines. Once the centre of the world’s richest goldfields, Welkom’s mining industry collapsed in the 1990s, giving rise to a dystopian criminal economy that saw thousands of men – known as zama-zamas – risk their lives to descend the mineshafts and dig for gold, often living for months and even years underground in unimaginable conditions.

At its height, South Africa’s mining sector produced more than seventy percent of the world’s gold, forming the bedrock of the global financial system. Today, in an apocalyptic afterlife, these mines continue to supply the international gold market through illicit channels.

Part mesmerising investigative thriller, part excavation of global capitalist history, Underworld traces the gold trade from its apartheid-era boom to the present, laying bare the human costs of extraction and the forces that sustain this vast underground economy.

Kimon de Greef said, “This is a book I’ve wanted to write for more than a decade, and it’s a great honour to be working on it with Picador, home to some of my all-time favourite nonfiction writers. Underworld is an ambitious project and I’m grateful to have the support of great publishers.”

Alpana Sajip, Senior Commissioning Editor, Picador, said, “The proposal for Underworld left me breathless. Epic and intimate, harrowing and impossible to look away from or forget, it’s a cinematically written and deeply researched story about the very worst things humans will do to each other to amass wealth, or to themselves to survive. Kimon de Greef is an incredibly compelling storyteller with a meticulous eye for the details and characters that bring his investigative work alive, and it’s a true honour to welcome him to the Picador list. I firmly believe that Underworld will be a future classic of the narrative nonfiction genre.”

Terry Morris, Managing Director, Pan Macmillan South Africa, said, “We are so proud to welcome Kimon de Greef to the Picador Africa list and to co-publish Underworld alongside our colleagues at Picador UK. In a country shaped by a complex history, Underworld confronts the origins of the mining industry as well as its ongoing unforeseen legacy. The journey of gold from disused local shafts to illicit global markets is a world few see, and Kimon’s book promises to bring clarity, understanding, and depth to these human stories.

This work will be an important reckoning with our past and present, and we are honoured to work with a writer of Kimon’s calibre and to publish it together with our Picador colleagues.”