Supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster.

Founded in 2020 by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, Hajar Press is an independent and proudly political publishing house run by and for people of colour.

Hajar was born out of our frustration with the publishing industry’s structural problems—institutional racism; commercial trend-following; Amazon’s domination; and the atomisation of readers and writers—as well as with the lack of internationalism and antiracist solidarity within many of our political movements.

We aim to build a community for people of colour, who are too often excluded from both these worlds: mainstream publishing and many conversations on the left. By writing on our own terms, we want to honour our histories, imagine new horizons and strengthen our collective power.

Joint Winner of Weatherglass Books Inaugural Novella Prize, chosen by Ali Smith.

Ali write about Aerth, “What planet are we on?  Can we leave?  Does it mean we can never go home again if we do? What does a phrase like worlds apart really mean? Deep-forged, witty and resonant, this dimensionally stunning novella deals with dystopia and hope in a way that reveals them as profoundly related.  A work of real energy and narrative grip, brilliantly earthy and airy at once, it blasts open a reader’s past/future consciousness and taps into literary antecedents as disparate as Hardy and Atwood. Funny, terrifying, humane, this is a thrilling journey in a story the size of a planet – no, the size of several, all of them altogether strange and uncannily familiar.”

Weatherglass Books is a new independent press founded by Neil Griffiths (novelist and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses) and Damian Lanigan (novelist and playwright).

Weatherglass was founded on a shared love of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a shared fear that it wouldn’t find a publisher today.

Weatherglass Books wants to clear a space for the next The Blue Flower.

“Running the Republic of Consciousness Prize I read hundreds of novels from small presses and loved a great many, but I did feel an absence of novels that were somehow exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.” Neil Griffiths, co-publisher

"We’re looking for intelligent, original, beautiful writing, and we're finding it. Additionally - maybe it's a reaction to the unhinged, fictional-seeming times we live in - we find writers trying to be truthful. It's a fascinating combination: writers who have extraordinary things to say, and are saying them with energy and style, whilst also trying to express something real and true about the world. It's bracing and exciting. It feels like the perfect time to start a literary press.” Damian Lanigan, co-publisher

Wadih Saadeh was fated to wander. He moved between exiles, from Beirut to Europe, until the earth entire became an exile. And his poem migrated with him, roaming through the city streets where the finest and cruelest scenes life has to offer may be seen, then into and through his own body, from where he contemplates himself in order to contemplate the world: two illusions, in opposition and insoluble. Poetry may be this perpetual voyage through senses and memories, but it is like the travelling of dreamers, it has no road. And like most wandering poets whose childhood waits for them in their future, Wadih Saadeh constructed a house out of his: a home for his soul with his mind stood on the threshold, on guard like a figure in a fairy tale. His poem is an open house, to which he hosts he invites the animals of Mount Lebanon, its flowers and insects, the mad and homeless and gypsies, departed relatives and fellow poets, both dead and alive, the whole world. The poet set up home in this house until he disappeared into it, and here, from his concealment, he brings language back to the simplicity of the first questions… only that his gaze is that of someone who knows that nothing he sees will he ever see again. Return is another illusion. Everything that is written is a beautiful gift, offered to the absence of those he loved. He is recovering, in that vast invisibility, some part of what once was then disappeared. The moment of its loss is complex, an entanglement of weightlessness, joy, and grief: grief, because the end is forever at the point of arrival and the process of departure is never-ending; joy, that the end has come at last to relieve him of the burdens of his past, his fears and fury and pleasures; and weightlessness, because the poet owns nothing, not even the word they write. His word belongs first and foremost to the dead, his father among them:

During the war, my father went searching the wilderness for a bone, that he might crush it with a stone and sate his hunger / From the lineage of that crushed bone came children, of which I was one. I was the son of a crushed bone.

Golan Haji

Tenement Press is an independent and unfunded publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion of experimental literary works—in English and first-time English language translation—wherein which the poetic and the political intersect.

Welcome to Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping small town life, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion.

Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything - nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the villages half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled.

As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit?

époque press  was founded in October 2017 with the aim of publishing great literary titles by authors from diverse backgrounds who may have been overlooked by the large global publishing houses. As part of this we also set up an online arts magazine, our é-zine, with the aim of connecting artists working in different mediums, in the hope it would stir the wider pot of creativity.

Like all good ideas, époque press was birthed in a local Brighton Coffee Shop/Pub, with the initial thought process quickly scribbled down on a till receipt.

The press is run by two life-long friends, Sean Campbell (MD and Editor in Chief) and Adam Bentley (Art & Print Director), both of whom have a lifelong passion for the arts and literature. We also have a great team behind us who help with submission reviews and the editorial process, as well as always being on hand to help serve wine at our book launches.

Everything we do, apart from physically printing the books, we do ourselves. This involves our own website design, cover design and typesetting, and we focus on delivering the highest quality in everything we do, and we hope you can see the results of this through our titles and our é-zine.

We pride ourselves on working closely with our authors, we involve them in every stage of bringing a book to publication and we pay royalties that are fair and representative of the work involved in writing and publishing a book.

All of our publishing decisions are based solely on the quality of the work and we are not motivated by commercial considerations, although of course we want our press, and our authors, to financially succeed. 

If you feel so inclined, you can help us continue with our é-thos by buying us a coffee, we certainly like to keep our caffeine levels up so we can keep on top of working with all of our great authors.