Shearsman Books blog

States of Independence 2026

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:27:43 GMT

States of Independence Book Fair in Leicester, 28 March.

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Eliza O'Toole Wins Poetry Prize in the East Anglian Books Awards

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:02:27 GMT

Eliza O'Toole's Buying the Farm wins Poetry Category in the East Anglian Book Awards

More details here .

January 2026 Launch Reading

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:11:02 GMT

Lanuch reading for Michelle Penn & Ian Seed, 13 January 2026.

We're launching these two books on 13 January at Swedenborg Hall in London.

Oxford Indie Book Fair 23 November 2025

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:42:08 GMT

Oxford Indie Book Fair, Sunday 23 November: we have a display....

We'll be there: come and see us....

Josephine Balmer reviewed in The Observer

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:38:22 GMT

Josephine Balmer reviewed in The Observer

https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/digging-for-the-dead

Bath Indie Book Fair

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:51:26 GMT

A date for the dairy — Bath Indie Book Fair

As you can see, we'll be in Bath on 8 November showing off our recent, and perhaps not-so-recent, publications. The Central Library is right above Waitrose, and easily accessed from the town centre, bus station, train station and a number of car parks.

Bridget Khursheed longlisted in the Saltire Awards

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:32:19 GMT

Bridget Khursheed's Exact Colour of Snow longlisted for the 2025 Saltire Awards

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Petra White shortlisted in Australia

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:39:28 GMT

Petra White shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry

Announced on 12 August, Petra White is shortlisted for the biggest literary prize in Australia, alongside 4 books from Australian presses. This is the first time a Shearsman title has been in the running for this prize, although we've had wins and shortlistings in the state-level prizes before.

Ruth Wiggins / Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 11:51:10 GMT

Rutth Wiggins longlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize.

Ruth Wiggins' The Lost Book of Barkynge has been longlisted — alongside 9 other volumes — for the 2025 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize for a first collection. Shortlist will be announced a month from now.

Carol Watts / ASLE-UKI Prize

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:54:43 GMT

Carol Watts shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI award.

Just after being shortlisted for the Laurel Prize, Mimic Pond has now been shortlisted for the biennial ASLE-UKI Award, the first time, I think, that there's been a poetry list for the award, which is devoted to books with an ecological theme. The winner will be confirmed next week as the ASLE-UKI conference in Galway.

Carol Watts / Laurel Prize

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:24:50 GMT

Carol Watts / Laurel Prize shortlist

Carol says: “I’m delighted and honoured to be shortlisted for the distinguished Laurel Prize.  Mimic Pond  is a collection that walked itself together quietly over several years, so it was a welcome surprise! It matters to be recognised and gathered together like this. We are in a time when poetries responding to the environmental crisis and planetary nature are urgently in play, sharing multiple forms of witness but also finding the language and new imaginaries to engage with the future, and all those who inhabit it. It feels like the prize underlines the importance of this, and the community of that writing.”

Carol Watts is a poet who lives in south-east London. Her twelve collections and chapbooks include  Mimic Pond, Kelptown  and  When Blue Light Falls  (Shearsman Books),  Occasionals  and  Wrack  (Reality Street),  Fifty-Six  with George Szirtes (Arc),  Sundog  (Veer), and  Dockfield  (Equipage). She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex.

Eliza O'Toole / Laurel Prize

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:20:51 GMT

Eliza O'Toole / Laurel Prize shortlist

Eliza says: “On the day my book was launched at the Small Publishers Fair in London, a browser looked at its cover and said, ‘oh no I don't want to read about the countryside, it’s all fields and farming’. And I thought — how can we ever hope to protect something that isn't cherished. Becoming a finalist means to me that the ‘country-side’, with all its fields and farming, with all of its ‘manifold particularities of the natural world’ has a chance to be recognised, not only as the ‘other' side of the country, but as a unified whole in its own right.“

Eliza O’Toole’s poems have appeared in Shearsman magazine, @rialtopoetry, Tears in the Fence , and  Poetry Review . She published  The Dropping of Petals  (Muscaliet Press, 2021),  A Cranic of Ordinaries   (Shearsman, 2024) and  Buying the Farm  (Shearsman, 2025). She was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24 for her pamphlet  The Unpinning of Moths . 

JR Carpenter / Laurel Prize

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:16:46 GMT

JR Carpenter / Laurel Prize shortlist

JR says: “Weather has long been the subject of small talk and indeed there are many minute observations in Measures of Weather. In light of the climate emergency we’re now living in we also need to ask big and different questions of weather and its measure, and the language we use to render this subject. I am immeasurably grateful to the Laurel Prize judges and organisers for helping to bring the pressing questions in this book to the attention of a much wider audience.” 

JR Carpenter is an artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer in the School of English at University of Leeds. Their work asks questions about place, displacement, climate, and colonialism, across performance, print, and digital media. Measures of Weather was The Observer’s poetry book of the month, February 2025.  https://luckysoap.com

Laurel Prize 2025 (continued)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:14:32 GMT

and here they are as a list...

The winner will be announced in Bradford on Friday 19 September.

Laurel Prize 2025

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:10:38 GMT

News of the day....

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Latest Huidobro publications

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:58:55 GMT

Latest Huidobro publications

Hover over the above cover for the new edition of the Selected Poems ...

We've just released a volume of Huidobro's uncollected poems, which — although it contains a number of stray manuscripts that were not central to his work — also includes the text of a poem long thought to have been lost and two translations thereof into English by the author himself. We are grateful to the Cuban poet — now based in Barcelona — Pedro Marqués de Armas, who tracked down the original text as published in Havana's Diario de la Marina in 1927 and kindly provided his scans of the poem for our publication. In addition, the Fundación Vicente Huidobro (Huidobro Foundation) and the Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago have provided, and approved for publication, scans of the author's own typewritten English translation of this poem, in two separate versions. Until they arrived, we had no idea that there WERE two versions of the translation. No previous book that we have seen has mentioned this.

In the wake of this volume appearing, we have also reissued the Selected Poems in a new edition. The first edition in 2019 was prepared early in out exploration of the author's oeuvre and all of the poems in that edition have now appeared in their rightful places elsewhere in the series, often in updated versions. We have also taken the opportunity to replace a couple of pieces with more appropriate selections, now that the entire series is getting closer to completion and more minor pieces can be found in the new Uncollected , and in the other single volumes already issued. Two volumes of poetry remain pending: Altazor , and the Painted Poems , both of which have been delayed yet again. The former has caused some considerable indigestion, and we are loathe to issue a version which doesn't meet our standards. Right now, it doesn't, but work progresses. The latter has changed shape several times but I am confident that we now have a suitable presentation, and it will appear in 2026. Also pending is the novel, Papa, or the Diary of Alicia Mir , probably the last of the author's fictions to join our list.

Free Verse Bookfair

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:19:57 GMT

Free Verse Bookfair in London, 26 April 2025

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Review of Elaine Randell's Collected

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:23:08 GMT

Extensive review of Elaine Randell's Collected on Ira Lightman substack — click on the cover below

Launch Reading 11 March 2025

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 19:19:02 GMT

featuring Gëzim Hajdari & Carol Watts

This reading takes place at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. (See map here .) Admission is free.

Gëzim Hajdari will be officially launching his Selected Poems in English. Also appearing is Carol Watts, reading from her 2024 Shearsman volume, Mimic Pond , for which we did not manage to have an official launch last year.

New, expanded edition of Skyquake

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:46:47 GMT

2nd edition of Skyquake now availabl

We've been poor at keeping this blog going, but intend to do better in future.

We've just released a 2nd edition of Huidobro's Skyquake / Temblor de cielo , this version having a revised translation PLUS the entire French text ( Tremblement de ciel ) written by the author, and a translation of that too. (And there are differences vetween the two versions.) This comes after last year's expanded 2nd edition of Equatorial & other poems , where we also added a French version of the title poem and some variant texts for Tour Eiffel . In another 2 months or so, we hope to be able to publish Huidobro's Uncollected Poems / Poemas inéditos . This is already 18-24 months later than planned, but the delay has been beneficial as we have managed to locate a famous missing poem by Huidobro, never previously issued in book form, in either Spanish OR English. Now, I say "discovered", but someone else actually did the discovering of the Spanish text, and then we asked permission to ride on their coat-tails. I'm pleased to say that they said yes. Assuming the final permissions come through, we will also be including scans of the author's typescripts.

Spanish Book Fair in London, Saturday 5 October

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 18:35:42 GMT

and this is our version of the official poster, concentrating on our own list....

Come and see us at Conway Hall.

London Spanish Book & Zine Fair

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 10:15:10 GMT

this coming Saturday, 5 October

This is our second time at the LSBZF, and this time in a larger and more accessible venue, in Conway Hall, Bloomsbury. Given our large Spanish and Latin American list, the majority of which is bilingual, we fit right in. Come and see us there.

Launch Reading 8 October 2025

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:30:41 GMT

New books by Claire Crowther and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Tuesday 8 October 2024, 7:30pm, Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury, London. Admission free.

Map here .

Scottish Book of the Year Longlist

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:25:37 GMT

2 Shearsman titles are on the longlist of 12 for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year

Aonghas Macneacail's beyond (bottom row, left) and Em Strang's Firebird (bottom row, right) have both made it onto the longlist for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, 2024. The shortlist will be announced at the end of October. Fingers crossed !

New titles by Huidobro

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 13:56:03 GMT

— both prose and poetry —

These titles have been in preparation for what seems like a long time, but, finally, I'm confident enough to announce that Adverse Winds (Vientos contrarios, 1926) will appear in September 2023; Satyr, or The Power of Words (Sátiro, o el poder de palabras, 1939) will appear in October 2023; and, Seeing and Touching (Ver y palpar, 1941) will at long last appear in November. The first two are already with the printer, and I'm sure the final volume will get there in time for publication in November.

These books have taken a long time to come to fruition, Adverse Winds being some 2 years late, and Seeing and Touching perhaps 18 months late. They've been tough to get right (or right enough ). I was unsure about publishing Satyr in this series at all, until I realised that my version was quite presentable, and that the book's links to the rest of the author's work made it a good thing to include. I've played around with translations of some of the other prose volumes by Huidobro, especially Papa, o el diario de Alicia Mir (1934), but that has so far resisted completion and is of more biographical, than literary interest.

With these three volumes almost ready to face the world, I will be returning to try to complete work on Last Poems (1948), which contains some very important poems. I'm adding the author's final interview to that volume too. I'd like to get the Painted Poems out in 2024 also, but it depends on whether I can obtain some extra images, and, crucially, permissions. A version of the book already exists, but I would like it to be more comprehensive. The final volume currently in the draft stage—and it's at a very early stage—is the Uncollected Poems , mopping up all the author's occasional and political verses. I've tended to work on these books concurrently, moving onto another when I get too bogged down with one of them. I find that time away, and engagement with other works by the same author, helps the process.

The keen observer of this series will note that Altazor has not been included—by common consent the author's magnum opus. That's because it has defeated me completely. Well, about 8 pages of it have defeated me, and there's no solution in sight. I may see if someone else can take it on, but, in any event, Eliot Weinberger's magisterial version is already available from Wesleyan University Press, and WUP seems disposed to keeping it print.

Tony Frazer

Shearsman reading, 14 June 2022

Fri, 27 May 2022 10:59:52 GMT

featuring David Herd and Will Stone

The next Shearsman reading features David Herd and Will Stone, and takes place on Tuesday 14 June, 7:30pm, at Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury, London. (The Hall entrance is on Barter Street, just behind the Swedenborg Society shop.)

David is launching his new collection, Walk Song , and we also catch up with Will Stone, reading from The Slowing Ride , which appeared during one of the lockdowns.

Admission free.

New PDF eBook by Mercedes Roffé

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 22:45:21 GMT

now published on our eBooks page

Go to the eBooks page here .

Strange times

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:48:10 GMT

This blog rarely gets used, but in strange times, all avenues of communication need to be employed. The book above, Molly Vogel's Florilegium has just appeared, albeit not at the most auspicious time, especially for a first collection. Would all customers and interested parties please note that we are still able to supply books at present, and will do so as long as the post offices are open — although our local one was closed yesterday, it must be said. We do have other options not too far away, however, and the usual online suspects (plus some enterprising indie stores) are doing their best to keep supply lines open. As long as Royal Mail, and the courier services, are functioning (fingers crossed...) we will try to keep supplying books but, in line with official guidance, we will keep trips out to a minimum.

For anyone trying to find our titles on amazon.com, there is a major problem at the moment — one we're trying to solve — but amazon.co.uk is fine. For the time being, US buyers are recommended to use SPD for any titles by US and Latin American authors, and Barnes and Noble online for the whole list.

Unless things change again, we expect to be able to send out Shearsman magazine in April, as our printer seems still be able to deliver to us. We're not sure how international mail will be affected at this stage, but there may well be a problem with some destinations.

Stay well, everyone.

Janet Sutherland's Home Farm reviewed

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 09:01:19 GMT

by Pam Thompson at London Grip

https://londongrip.co.uk/2019/08/london-grip-poetry-review-janet-sutherland/

Dates for the Shearsman reading series

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 08:58:12 GMT

Shearsman readings October 2019 — May 2020

The dates for the Shearsman reading series at Swedenborg Hall for the period October 2019 to May 2020 have now been settled. Please put these in your diary and, regular attendees , please note that some of these are on a WEDNESDAY instead of a Tuesday. All start at 7:30pm.

Wed 9 October 2019
Tues 12 November 2019
Tues 14 January 2020
Tues 11 February 2020
Wed 11 March 2020
Tues 14 April 2020
Wed 13 May 2020

Huidobro at Frankfurt

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 19:09:03 GMT

At last week's Frankfurt Book Fair, the Chilean stand was full of pictures of Huidobro, in honour of the passage of 70 years since his death in 1948.

2019 titles #2

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 22:45:54 GMT

And there's a lot more Huidobro on the way

2019 titles

editor@shearsman.com (Tony Frazer) — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 23:07:15 GMT

Ok, so here's a first glimpse of 2019.

Some long-held plans are finally going to come to fruition in early 2019, when we will start publishing the first in a series of books by the great Chilean modernist poet, Vicente Huidobro. We're starting with the huge prose poem, Skyquake (Temblor de cielo) first published in 1931 and the Arctic Poems (Poemas árticos), first published in 1918. Shortly after that there will be a big Selected Poems (well, Selected Poems & Manifestos in fact). All three volumes will carry a family look, which we hope to carry forward into other volumes. Later in the year we hope to be able to publish the first ever complete English translations of Huidobro's last three books, Ver y palpar (Seeing and Feeling, 1941), El ciudadano del olvido (The Citizen of Oblivion, 1941) and Últimos poemas (Last Poems, 1948). Keep an eye on this blog for more news…

Poetry Bookfair

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Saturday 21 April 2018

If you happen to be in London on Saturday 21 April 2018, please come to see us at the first Non-normative Poetry Bookfair at:

T-chances
399 High Road,
Tottenham
London
N17 6QN

Which is a short walk from Seven Sisters station on the Victoria Line. T-chances was recently won for community use after a long struggle against eviction.

Website: http://www.tchances.com

The Fair runs from 12 noon until 7 p.m. and will feature readings from many of the participating presses.

New Website & Logo for Shearsman Books

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

A first blog post from Shearsman to celebrate the launch of the overhauled website, and our new logo.

Check in here for further information in the days to come.