What are the opening hours?

Monday 9am - 5pm Tuesday 9am - 5pm Wednesday 10am - 6pm Thursday 9am - 5pm Friday 9am - 5pm

The87press, Brixton (2025)

19/08/2025

✨ COVER REVEAL ✨

Autobiography of a Performance: Scores, Essays and Reflections by Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil, coming October 2025!

Pre-order here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/autobiography-of-a-performance/bhanu-kapil/blue-pieta/9781068751592

We have a limited number of advanced reader copies, so reviewers please get in touch via the87press.co.uk/contact-us and tell us a bit about your work/where you publish!

Booksellers, we distribute through

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025.
A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork).
This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds.

Blue Pieta is a multidisciplinary artist, dramaturg, director and performer. They were dramaturg for Akram Khan Company’s production Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) and musical operetta Nine Songs directed by Farooq Chaudhry OBE with musical direction by Jocelyn Pook. Their art has been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Courtauld Gallery, Britten Pears Arts, and staged at The Place, Battersea Arts Centre and Royal Court Theatre.

Bhanu Kapil is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. A former Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow of the University of Cambridge, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University and a Cholomondeley Award from the Society of Authors, both for poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, How To Wash A Heart (Pavillion Poetry) won the TS Eliot Prize.

15/08/2025

More about the authors included in the87press poetry book subscription 2025-6 📖📚

13/08/2025

✨ COVER REVEAL ✨
Saints of Little Faith by Megan Pinto coming November 2025! Pre-order at the link in bio.

These poems’ meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon.

Megan Pinto’s poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Poets & Writers, and The Peace Studio. She lives in New York City.

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness.

"Beautifully rendered ruminative and thoughtful coming-of-age poems" — Victoria Chang (), Forward-Prize Winning Poet

11/08/2025

Looking forward to publishing this beautiful collection of poems by Gabrielle Bates 📖 Judas Goat, coming to the UK and Ireland in October 2025.

Gabrielle Bates’ electrifying debut questions what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. This collection wrestles with betrayal, forced obedience, violence and young womanhood.

Gabrielle Bates’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she cohosts the podcast The Poet Salon, works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, and teaches occasionally through the University of Washington. www.gabriellebat.es

"...through all the layers of large and little violences emerges a speaker who believes in love, a voice that yearns for the mysterious otherwhere: ‘I am too dying/ of what I don’t know.’ I was stunned by this magnificent debut—here is the voice of a poet I will be reading again and again." — Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

09/08/2025

Today is !

To celebrate we've asked our team what they've ben reading.

Let us know what you're reading in the comments!

Sopo, Creative Manager
Brian by Jeremy Cooper
Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Radical Potential of Female Friendship by Anahit Behrooz

Kashif, Head Editor and Company Secretary
The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Triton by Samuel R. Delaney

Aisheshek, Creative Manager
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Azad, Director
Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant
A Southern Music by T. M. Krishna
Raga’n Josh by Sheila Dhar
Indenture Aesthetics by Jordache A. Ellapen
Nerve Church (Double Trio Vol. 3) by Nathaniel Mackey
Time in Indian Music by Martin Clayton
The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi

05/08/2025

We'd like to invite you to our 7th birthday at Lala Books in Camberwell!

Joining us will be dove/Christine Kirubi (WILDPLASSEN), Karenjit Sandhu (young girls! and gestalt), and Luke Roberts (Home Radio). In addition to poetry readings, a discussion and Q&A will be facilitated by our director, Azad Ashim Sharma.

We hope to see you there!

Doors open at 6.30pm for a 7pm start. Tickets are £10 and fully redeemable against any poetry book purchased at the event.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/poetry-at-lala-books-the87press-7th-birthday-celebrations-tickets-1487054472959?aff=oddtdtcreator

If you'd like to come but can’t afford a ticket, please select a free ticket or email [email protected] — there are a limited number of free tickets and books available through their community pay-it-forward scheme.

the87press was co-founded by South-Asian poets Kashif Sharma-Patel and Azad Ashim Sharma. Established on principles of equity, (late) modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, environmentalism, marxism and social justice, the87press quickly became the South London home for countercultural, hybrid, and experimental works of poetry, prose, and non-fiction from racialised, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, and working class authors, initially and in particular, from communities extending the work and ambitions of the British Poetry Revival.

05/08/2025

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is back with another workshop 14th of September! Grab your spot at Out of Ruin: a poetry workshop with Victoria Adukwei Bulley✨

What kind of poems can be written now? How and to what ends must language function? Drawing from texts by poet Harmony Holiday and scholar Bedour Alagraa, this workshop explores how poems might navigate and be shaped by ideas of ruin, catastrophe and disaster. Participants will experiment with myth, breakages in sense-making and form on the page in search of a poetics that both disrupts and reinvigorates our relation to language.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer, and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Alfred A. Knopf.

03/08/2025

Admiring the beautiful cover of the UK edition of Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen, coming September 2025 with the87press.

Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the colour green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.

This powerful collection, previously published by University of Nebraska Press, 2021, has won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award.

Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. Susan is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She is currently the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

“The first poem of Nguyen's powerful debut asks: "At the center of your calamity, what grows?" That question serves as an entry point for poems that interweave grief, exodus, and girlhood... Nguyen's poetry reveals a remarkable embrace of complexity while accounting for the difficulties of complicity, witness, and forgiveness.”
— starred Publisher Weekly's review

01/08/2025

Looking back at when we published Kat Sinclair's The Pharmacy, a fiery second collection about the life experience of care amidst austerity.

Grab your copy at our online shop!

An extended exploration of family, loss, and the indignities of medical institutions. At once influenced by autotheory, life experience of care, and a fervent critique of austerity, this is a fiery second collection from Kat Sinclair.

"The Pharmacy shocks and soothes, jars and lulls: this is a collection deeply of and defiantly against its time. " - Helen Charman

"Where ‘the hospital is a factory’, out of the deadness of memeified language and bloodied pop-cultural dreck, these side- eye-lyrics don’t just transcribe addictive assaults on attention but hold to our aftermaths, without healalls. " - Dom Hale

31/07/2025

We are joining , , and in asking constituents in Wallasey, Liverpool / Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham / Barnsley North and Birmingham Yardley to write to their MPs and request the Home Office to allow and expedite the deferral of biometric data application for visa applicants in Gaza, and to open a route of safe passage for Shaimaa, Haia and the other students to travel to the UK.

We have a template you can adapt - the link is in our bio (top of our linktree) along with a list of MPs and their emails.

30/07/2025

In honour of International Friendship Day, we'd like to shine a light on the great literary friendship of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker.

You can read the collected letters between the two ground-breaking q***r black feminist poets, from our Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Edited by Julie R. Enszer.

29/07/2025

Such a pleasure to have Meera Ghanshamdas at our 30th of July at our Hummingbirds event!

She will be joined by Rhoni Blankenhorn and Azad Ashim Sharma at Round Table Books.

This event is free with registration🎟 https://tinyurl.com/34bx7k5n

The87press

19/08/2025

15/08/2025

13/08/2025

11/08/2025

09/08/2025

05/08/2025

05/08/2025

03/08/2025

01/08/2025

31/07/2025

30/07/2025

29/07/2025

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm