What are the opening hours?

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

The87press, Brixton (2025)

15/10/2025

✨ LISTENING TO RAP IN ARABIC MUSIC🎶
Come join us for another literary salon where we will discuss Palestinian and Lebanese writer Rayya El Zein's Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic - where she listens to the experiences of rappers and their audiences in three Arab cities as they search for ways to engage the political beyond the framework of resistance.

Hummingbirds is a literary salon curated by the87press aiming to hold space for authors and interlocutors to have conversations about recently published work. This iteration charts a new thread in that conversation which aims to bring academic publishing to a community audience.

Host: Azad Ashim Sharma, Founding Director of the87press
Interlocutor: Alia Al Ghussain
Author: Rayya El Zein

Free with Registration ✨ at Housmans Bookshop https://tr.ee/PGGH068cCG

The event will be structured around a live reading from the book by Rayya and a conversation with audience participation encouraged.

Alia Al Ghussain is a British-Palestinian organiser and activist engaged in human rights research that focuses on Big Tech accountability. She is currently the Chair of War on Want.

Rayya El Zein is an independent writer and researcher. A Palestinian and Lebanese American mother and daughter, her recent writing explores return, yearning, and other frameworks of belonging and becoming.

14/10/2025

We've got a special virtual reading from The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr , illustrated by Safdar Ahmed screened our next MUSHAIRA — a night of poetry, music, and food.

Mushaira is a live literature reading series featuring authors published by independent presses.
October 24th 2025, doors at 7 Café OTO
Tickets at the link in bio!

Featuring the launches of Autobiography of a Performance by Blue Pieta/Bhanu Kapil with a performance featuring vocalist/musician Kath Gifford, and Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates . The evening will also feature guest readings from poets Hannah Copley and Isabelle Baafi.

DJ Jimmy Two Shoes will provide music throughout the evening on either side of the readings and Chef Yogi will have a pop up kitchen serving vegan and vegetarian Sri Lankan cuisine.

To help our chef prepare and minimise food waste, please purchase your tickets as soon as possible. All meals will range from £10-£15 with smaller snack options also available.

10/10/2025

the87press is a signatory to this letter, published today in the Bookseller, and organised by a coalition of publishers including
and others.

We are looking forward to contributing to ongoing conversations to build community, financial security, and share skills, knowledge, and experience with independent publishers.

Read the full article in the Bookeller and buy a book direct from us and our friends today!

One of the hallmarks of independent publishing is its capaciousness around comminity building and the dedication to collaboration and conversation. the87press is deeply honoured to be part of a vibrant cohort of inspiring and visionary publishers. We look forward to being part of our ongoing collective work towards financial security across the sector and extend our gratitude to the organisers of this letter for holding space to gather and share challenges.

06/10/2025

Cover reveal of Kazim Ali's Indian Winter! Coming out in November this year.

Pre-order now! 📖Link in bio

Indian Winter begins with a narrator trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family's inability to accept his q***rness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can't help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.

"Indian Winter is a melancholic but ultimately open-hearted novel containing truly elegant and erotic s*x writing."
– Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things

Kazim Ali is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, essay, fiction, and cross-genre work. He has also edited an anthology of Muslim writers and books of critical writing on poets Agha Shahid Ali, Jean Valentine, and Shreela Ray, as well as translated books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Sohrab Sepehri. After teaching positions at various colleges including Oberlin, Davidson, and St. Mary's College of California, he was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he currently chairs the Department of Literature.

03/10/2025

📖ACT ANNOUNCEMENT📖

We will be celebrating the launch of Autobiography of a Performance by Blue Pieta/Bhanu Kapil, with a performance featuring vocalist/musician Kath Gifford.

Join the87press for our next MUSHAIRA — a night of poetry, music, and food.

October 24th 2025, doors at 7
Tickets at the link in bio!

Blue Pieta is a director, performer and dramaturg based in the UK. They were dramaturg for Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) directed by Akram Khan. Bhanu Kapil is a poet based in Cambridge. Her first UK collection, How To Wash A Heart,won the TS Eliot Prize. Since 2022, Pieta and Kapil have performed in a succession of collective performances derived from Kapil’s poems and choreographed by Pieta. These performances have been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Burley Fisher Literary Festival, The Place, The Horse Hospital, and the University of Cambridge.

Kath Gifford is a vocalist/musician who has previously collaborated with Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil in the performances of “How To Wash A Heart” and “Omphalos”. Together as Hexess, Kath and Blue also create syncretic pan-British rituals (think chaotic dance-offs, drumming and bread fights) celebrating the many traditions of British peoples, both contemporary and historic, in counter to rising ethno-nationalism.

In a previous life, Kath played in Snowpony and Stereolab and still plays with Himmel.

We're also launching The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr, illustrated by Safdar Ahmed (virtual reading). The evening will also feature guest readings from poets Hannah Copley and Isabelle Baafi.

DJ Jimmy Two Shoes will provide music throughout the evening on either side of the readings and Chef Yogi will have a pop up kitchen serving vegan and vegetarian Sri Lankan cuisine.

To help our chef prepare and minimise food waste, please purchase your tickets as soon as possible. All meals will range from £10-£15 with smaller snack options also available.

01/10/2025

We are proud to announce that we raised £1000 for Palestine at our Dear Diaspora event on Sunday! This much needed financial aid has been divided equally and transferred to Maram, Mohammed, and Ibrahim in Gaza, Palestine.

Thank you to all the readers, everyone who attended in person and on Zoom, and everyone who donated. We celebrated the launch of Dear Diaspora with beautiful readings by and , followed by a reading and q&a by herself.
We then heard poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Najwan Darwish read in Arabic, English and Vietnamese by Nariman Youssef, Atef Alshaer, and

Ticket and book sales from the event totalled £813 and the87press was able to make a donation that brought the fundraiser total to £1000.

If you would like to continue to support these families please follow and

Free Palestine. ❤

30/09/2025

Gabrielle Bates is going on a UK book tour to celebrate the October publication of Judas Goat!
She will be reading in London, Edinburgh, Bristol, and Cardiff.

We hope to see you there!
Links are in bio (Cardiff link coming soon).

London,
Friday 24 Oct 7pm
Part of the87press MUSHAIRA (with Blue Pieta & Bhanu Kapil (with Kath Gifford) + Gabrielle Bates + Omar Sakr & Safdar Ahmed (virtual) + Hannah Copley + Isabelle Baafi)

Edinburgh,
Monday 27 Oct 7pm
with Jessica Widner

Bristol,
Wednesday 29 Oct, 7pm
with

Cardiff,
Thursday 30 Oct, 6.30pm
with

29/09/2025

Happy Publication day to Susan Nguyen's Dear Diaspora ✨

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.

Buy your copy of the book at our online shop: www.the87press.co.uk/shop/p/dear-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 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

29/09/2025

We're happy to welcome to the press Emily Lee Luan who will be publishing the UK edition of 回 / Return in February this year ✨

Originally published by Nightboat Books in 2023. Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

"Luan’s meditative debut explores the Taiwanese diasporic experience through poems rich with vivid imagery, imagination, and candor that draw from the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem."
– Publishers Weekly

"In 回 / Return, Emily Lee Luan’s stunning reflections on sorrow haunt the sensorium. This sorrow—or “an anger rooted in sadness”—is untranslatable, rooted in the violence of colonization, displacement, and deracination. And yet Luan’s poems, which alloy Chinese and English into feats of formal ingenuity and beauty, translate the unspeakable. Read it once, then read it again slowly to perceive the spectrum of emotions Luan unseams with dexterity. 回 / Return heralds a potent new voice in poetry."
– Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs (2021) selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She teaches at Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

26/09/2025

More about the authors included in the87press poetry book subscription 2025-6 📖
Check out on our website: https://www.the87press.co.uk/poetrybooksubscription

The subscription of 7 books prioritises women writers, BIPOC writers and q***r writers from the US, continuing a long tradition of trans-Atlantic conversation. By bringing highly regarded literature from the US for readers based in the UK and Ireland we seek to enrich conversations around literature, cultural politics and global diasporas in a time of increased militarised borders and rising ethno-nationalism.

📖The book list will include:
- Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen
- Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
- Saints of Little Faith by Megan Pinto
- Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
- 回 / Return by Emily Lee Luan
- The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup
Selected Poems by Pat Parker

24/09/2025

We're delighted to announce one of our acts for the next MUSHAIRA is our very own Gabrielle Bates!

Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (US: Tin House, 2023; UK: the87press, 2025), named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she is currently based in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Her poems have been published by the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, the Best American Experimental Poetry anthology, and Literature Wales, among other publications.

October 24th 2025, doors at 7 at Cafe OTO
Tickets at the link in bio!

Mushaira is a live literature reading series featuring authors published by independent presses. This one includes the launches of Autobiography of a Performance by Blue Pieta/Bhanu Kapil, Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates, and The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr, illustrated by Safdar Ahmed (virtual reading). The evening will also feature guest readings from poets Hannah Copley and Isabelle Baafi.

DJ Jimmy Two Shoes will provide music throughout the evening on either side of the readings and Chef Yogi will have a pop up kitchen serving vegan and vegetarian Sri Lankan cuisine.

23/09/2025

✨ COVER REVEAL ✨

Tetra Nova will be released in November 2025. Published in the US by Deep Vellum Publishing (), we're excited to welcome this debut novel from the award winning performance artist and poet to the UK and Ireland.

Part investigative document, part dreamscape, this ambitious debut novel traverses space, the mythic and the profane, into a song of humanity beyond trauma. Voices become durational, staged, fragmented, and unabashed. Presented as one final production, whether by cinema or live music, the heart of performance art ultimately grapples with the language of plague on a cosmological scale.

Pre-order at the link in bio!

Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two award-winning chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Tetra Nova is her first novel. She currently teaches poetry and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech, where she continues her practice as a performance artist.

The87press

15/10/2025

14/10/2025

10/10/2025

06/10/2025

03/10/2025

01/10/2025

30/09/2025

29/09/2025

29/09/2025

26/09/2025

24/09/2025

23/09/2025

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