Our Purpose
Our stated charitable aims are:
“To advance for the public benefit literary fiction of the highest merit from small presses in the UK and Ireland through a range of reading, speaking and event initiatives, and by providing grants and assistance to practitioners and producers of literary fiction.”
Small presses are a vital element in sustaining the biodiversity of the UK’s literature culture. Without them, fiction of the highest literary merit, especially experimental and innovative writing, would struggle to find a home, and by extension readers’ choice would be impoverished.
In some years small presses barely break even, and that is with the owners paying themselves either not at all or at an effective rate per hour well below a minimum wage equivalent. Unlike larger publishing houses, small presses do not have the revenue from high volume commercial titles to underwrite potential losses of books that, while possessing high literary merit, struggle to turn a profit.
And yet still small presses find a way of continuing in the hope of discovering another great piece of literature they can bring into the world.
Without small presses taking creative and financial risks we wouldn’t have A Girl is a Half Formed Thing by Eimear MacBride published by Galley Beggar, the English translation of Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo tr. Frank Wynne published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Attrib. by Eley Williams published by Influx, Murmur by Will Eaves published by CB editions, Lote by Shola von Reinhold published by Jacaranda Press. And the list could go on and on ... and on.
It is a deep irony that those publishers taking the largest creative and financial risks are, in a purely financial sense, least able to do so. It was this state of affairs that prompted the founding of the Republic of Consciousness in 2017.
The Republic of Consciousness main work is its Prize for Small Presses.
Prizes have impact across the whole literary community. They act as a curatorial instrument for the media, booksellers and readers, raising awareness of books that might otherwise find themselves lost in the great volume of works published.
However, the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses has never operated like a traditional literary prize, which invariably awards money to the writer of the winning work, which they are free to spend as they wish.
Instead our explicit aim with the prize has always been to support a range of publishers for their on-going commitment to work of high literary merit.
From Year 1 we have made it explicit that the prize is for publishers, and that we aim to share the prize money across more than one press and that the money awarded is to be used to support a difficult financial decision – a new commission, a second print run – which in turns further supports the production of literature of high merit. In this respect we have always regarded the prize money more like a grant or bursary.
In 2020, the prize awarded the most money in its 5-year history to the largest number of presses, with each of the 10 publishers on the long list receiving £1000; the short list a further £2000 each. And to differentiate ourselves further from other prizes the winning book / press didn’t receive any further financial award.
Our aim with the prize has always been focused on the wider public benefit which in our view is much greater than any limited private benefit to the recipient.
While our main work is the prize, throughout the year we run a range of events and initiatives including a Book of the Month club, which promotes small presses and high quality literary fiction but also raises further funds for our other activities, provide lectures to Creative Writing students, and arrange readings in bookshops around the country and panel discussions at literary festivals. We also run competitions to win books, host a blog “the conch” on our website and promote small press stories and news of literary fiction in our newsletter and our social media channels.
In summary, we do whatever we can to promote and support small presses and therefore to advance, for the public benefit, literary fiction of the highest merit.