Carcanet Press

Carcanet Press Carcanet publishes an award-winning, comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry. Carcanet was a literary magazine, founded in 1962.

Michael Hind, a member of the original editorial board, recalls how the idea was to 'collect together and publish as a periodical poetry, short fiction, and "intelligent criticism of all the arts"; there were to be both student and senior members contributions.' The intention was to link Oxford and Cambridge. The magazine Carcanet had fallen on hard times by October 1967 when Michael Schmidt, a ne

wly arrived undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, took it over. Times got harder still. In 1969 as a swansong the magazine produced a few pamphlets: poetry by new writers from Britain, India and the United States, and a book of translations. The reviews were encouraging. In 1970-1971 Carcanet Press became Ltd. The swansong continues, the bird having upped sticks and left Matthew Arnold's (and Robert Graves's) South Hinksey, Oxford, for Thomas de Quincey's Manchester.

'Continue to build' is what independent literary houses must do. They build readership and backlist, but also authority and their own legitimacy. We make books available and, in an age of disposables, keep them available. As the balance of publishing shifts to front list, Carcanet, radical in disposition, keeps books in print for as long as possible. This kind of husbandry has more in common with forestry than with fast food. Carcanet enjoys Arts Council support and can range more widely than commercial publishers dare to do. Its list includes, alongside new writers from all over the world, major authors from the twentieth and earlier centuries, figures about whom readers and writers need to know if they are to get a hold on the Modern and its aftermaths. Our commitments involve the mammoth Ford Madox Ford, Robert Graves and Hugh MacDiarmid projects. We have forged strong Anglo-European and Anglo-Commonwealth links. Our focal interest is in literature in English -- all the Englishes now spoken and written. In 1999 the Press acquired Oxford University's fine poetry list. OxfordPoets now emanate from Manchester. Latterly we have forged close links with Glasgow, where Carcanet has an editorial office in the School of English and Scottish Literature and Language. Since the age of the venerable Bede, translation has been crucial to the growth of our literature. Carcanet is naturally active here, producing award-winning translations of the classics and of new work from around the world. Dedicated to discovery, appraisal and reappraisal, Carcanet is a unique survivor in the precarious world of literary imprints. Our editorial continuity has generated a list of deep coherence and innovation, not only among the authors rediscovered but also among the new authors we publish. In an age teased by post-Modern relativism and post-millennial uncertainty, where literary value sometimes plays second fiddle to the demon profit and that other demon of ephemeral political imperatives, Carcanet takes its bearing from Modernism. It bases its activities on the best practice of the last century, during which great lists were forged -- some of which did not survive as independents into the changing twenty-first century.

⭐ Discount Spotlight: Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung 🌱https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174856/pattern-book/The Carcan...
19/07/2025

⭐ Discount Spotlight: Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung 🌱
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174856/pattern-book/

The Carcanet Summer Sale is on! Enjoy 10% off all books published this year using the code CP10SS2025 at the checkout until the end of the month.

Jon McGregor writes: ‘In these wonderful, breath-stopping and heart-enlarging poems, Éireann Lorsung asks only that we pay close attention – to the text, to the world, to the way the world becomes note by note the text – while she pays close attention alongside us. These are poems conducted at ground level, at walking pace, attentive to the changing of the light, of the seasons, of the certainties we thought we were growing up with. Here are poems about the American Midwest, the English midlands, the low country of Flanders; about flax, fieldfares, rivers, fathers and brothers, lovers, fabrics, sewing, sowing, grammar, bicycles, umbrellas, rain and snow, fading light, damp houses, tea, gardens, glass jars, distance, language, breath, touch, and the strangeness of metaphor. These are poems to attend to, return to, and share with the community of readers who either already adore Éireann Lorsung’s work or are about to discover it.’

Threaded through with filaments of others’ poems – from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks – Pattern-book’s sonnets, couplets, quatrains and invented forms draw on family life, art history, grief, time and the natural world. Woven of recurring images, Lorsung’s delight in form brings pattern to vivid life.

Order using the code CP10SS2025 for 10% off and free UK P&P: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174856/pattern-book/

‘Known for the tidal fluency of her perceptions, Cannon’s words seem shaped and sheened by the most elemental of energie...
18/07/2025

‘Known for the tidal fluency of her perceptions, Cannon’s words seem shaped and sheened by the most elemental of energies – as though her poems were drawn from “the core / of a glacier-sculpted mountain”, glistening like trickled water or the purest light.’

Ciarán O’Rourke on Moya Cannon, for the Dublin Review of Books: https://drb.ie/inscribing-time/
Order your copy of the book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174894/buntings-honey/

  Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Writing mainly of animals and artefacts, local history and local weather, Moya Cannon may nevertheless be ranked among the great love poets of this island. Her work expresses kinship with a world it feels impelled to examine in detail, embodying, in its limpid, explorin...

Congratulations to Catherine-Esther Cowie, whose collection Heirloom has been shortlisted for the 2025 Jerwood Prize for...
17/07/2025

Congratulations to Catherine-Esther Cowie, whose collection Heirloom has been shortlisted for the 2025 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward Prizes for Poetry!

The 2025 shortlist was selected by a judging panel chaired by novelist Sarah Hall, alongside poets Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, Sean O’Brien, and Rommi Smith. Together, they read over 214 poetry collections and reviewed 340 single poems.

Sarah Hall said of the shortlists: ‘From songs to sonnets to the surreal, there’s the creative renewal of forms alongside innovation. Politics and playfulness, passion and risks. Lyricism and the subversion of languages. Indelible artefacts, kinetics, a truly extraordinary range of expressions.’

Well done Catherine-Esther, and all the other shortlisted poets and publishers! 🎉
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/catherine-esther-cowie-shortlisted-for-jerwood-prize-for-best-first-collection/

The recording of the online book launch held for Bunting's Honey by Moya Cannon, hosted by Vincent Woods, is up on our Y...
16/07/2025

The recording of the online book launch held for Bunting's Honey by Moya Cannon, hosted by Vincent Woods, is up on our YouTube now! Click below to watch ⬇️

The recording of the online book launch held for Bunting's Honey by Moya Cannon, hosted by Vincent Woods on 18th June 2025.On Friday 25 July at 6pm, join Moy...

Great to see Passion by David Morley and Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine both included on John Clegg's Summer 202...
16/07/2025

Great to see Passion by David Morley and Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine both included on John Clegg's Summer 2025 picks for the London Review Bookshop website!

2025 has been a wonderful year for poetry so far. This summer, I’ve been enjoying the latest collection from David Morley, Passion – there’s a short poem called…

⭐ Discount Spotlight: Commonwealth by Theophilus Kwek 🗺️https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174832/commonwealth/The Carcan...
12/07/2025

⭐ Discount Spotlight: Commonwealth by Theophilus Kwek 🗺️
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174832/commonwealth/

The Carcanet Summer Sale is on! Enjoy 10% off all books published this year using the code CP10SS2025 at the checkout until the end of the month.

A neighbourhood containing Singapore’s oldest public housing estates, a catchphrase for the dream of equitable distribution, the long tail of the British Empire: the word ‘Commonwealth’ uncovers rich seams of history, replete with conquests, tragedies and once-potent visions of the future. Commonwealth takes as its starting-point the massive Bukit Ho Swee fires of the 196os – an event as deeply seared into the history of Kwek’s family as the nation’s own – and traces the dislocations and relocations that have come before it, and in its wake.

Kwek’s earlier poetry collections dealt with questions of personal rootedness and larger-scale displacement; still formally adept, Commonwealth is a new departure, drawing on a wide array of documentary and oral history sources to address upheavals of individual and collective lives within one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

Order using the code CP10SS2025 for 10% off and free UK P&P: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174832/commonwealth/

‘A dreamlike sense of normality suspended, as well as of childhood’s intrinsic strangeness, pervades the collection.’Fio...
11/07/2025

‘A dreamlike sense of normality suspended, as well as of childhood’s intrinsic strangeness, pervades the collection.’

Fiona Sampson on Fawzia Muradali Kane, for The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/04/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup
Get the book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174870/guaracara/

The Anchorage by Bernard O’Donoghue; Guaracara by Fawzia Muradali Kane; Bunting’s Honey by Moya Cannon; Old World by Robert Crawford; Mouth by Mona Arshi; Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

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