Coinciding with the announcement that Leonard Cohen is to tour Australia in January 2009, Text Publishing is delighted to reveal that it will publish for the first time in Australia two of Cohen’s classic novels, Beautiful Losers and The Favourite Game.

Leonard Cohen needs no introduction. From his roots as a poet he rose to fame as a musician and composer of dark and broken ballads. Cohen is a quintessential figure of the sixties still filling stadiums today, as he will do in January 2009 when he returns to Australia as part of an international tour.

Cohen’s 1963 debut, The Favourite Game, tells the story of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish Montreal family. His world is full of death, love, war, women, hyponotism. But when he meets Shell, Breavman finally discovers the demands and sacrifices required by love.

In 1966, Cohen published Beautiful Losers, the tale of a complex love triangle—three people united by their sexual obsession and their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, a mythic seventeenth-century Mohawk saint. Ripe with biblical rhetoric, Beautiful Losers is a hymn to loss, sex and obsession.

As Australia enters its most conservative period in decades, the publication of Cohen’s works is a timely reminder of an era less conforming and stifled: a time that fostered Cohen and his contemporaries, like Brautigan, Bukowksi and Burroughs; and enabled him to compose these visionary and rambling explorations in tragedy, humour, irreverence and honesty.

Text will publish both novels in January, to coincide with Cohen’s tour of each Australian capital city between 24 January and 7 February 2009. In August 2009 Text will also publish Nick Cave’s first novel in twenty years, The Death of Bunny Munro.