Tall Lighthouse is an independent publishing house in the UK, established in 1999 by Les Robinson. [1] It publishes full collections of poetry, pamphlets, and the anthology City Lighthouse, a collection of poems by established and emerging poets alike, having featured work by Maurice Riordan, Hugo Williams, Daljit Nagra and Roddy Lumsden, among others. The press has established itself as a leading light on the small press poetry scene, [2] four of its pamphlet publications having received the Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice Award in Spring 2006, Summer and Winter 2008, and Spring 2009. [3] The press was founded by Les Robinson in 1999, and run by Robinson until 2011, when he stepped down in favor of Gareth Lewis. Robinson returned to the director's role after Lewis died in 2016. [4]
Poets published by Tall Lighthouse include Sarah Howe, Helen Mort, Rhian Edwards, Aoife Mannix, Baden Prince, Pierre Ringwald, Heather Taylor, Alan Buckley, Ben Parker and Jodie Hollander. [5] A number of young poets (under 30) are also published as part of the press's Pilot series.
The Pilot series is a project started by Tall Lighthouse in 2007, aimed at publishing poetry pamphlets by eighteen poets under the age of 30, under the editorship of Roddy Lumsden. [6] The project attracted Arts Council funding, and has so far met with success, two of the five Eric Gregory Award winners for 2008 being Pilot series featured poets. [7]
The poets published as part of the series to date are:
Five of the Pilot poets were also chosen to feature at 2009's StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival, held in St Andrews. [8]
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T S Eliot Estate. The T S Eliot Foundation took over the running of the T S Eliot Prize in 2016, appointing Chris Holifield, formerly director of the Poetry Book Society as its new director, when the former Poetry Book Society charity had to be wound up, with its book club and company name taken over by book sales agency Inpress Ltd in Newcastle. At present, the prize money is £20,000, with each of nine runners-up receiving £1500 each, making it the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition. The Prize has been called "the most coveted award in poetry".
Marie Howe is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Magdalene. In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York.
Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist and astrologer. She won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for her poetry in 1996 and her YA novel Witchstruck, written as Victoria Lamb, won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Young Adult Romantic Novel of the Year Award for 2013. Her sister is the novelist, actress and singer Sarah Holland. She also writes commercial fiction under various pseudonyms, including Betty Walker, JJ Holland, Victoria Lamb, Elizabeth Moss, Beth Good and Hannah Coates.
Brendan Cleary is a poet who was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland but lives in England.
Roderick Chalmers "Roddy" Lumsden was a Scottish poet. He was born in St Andrews and educated at Madras College. He published seven collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade, among other anthologies.
The Scottish poet Andrew Buchanan Jackson was born on 19 June 1965, in Glasgow.
Wrecking Ball Press is an independent poetry & prose publishing company, based in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Wrecking Ball Press was established and is edited by Shane Rhodes; it was born in the back of a café.
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.
Belladonna* Collaborative is a small press non-profit publisher and collaborative organization based in Brooklyn, New York City. It was founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky as a reading series at Bluestockings in New York, NY. The reading series quickly expanded to a matrix of readings, publications, and informal salons, featuring avant-garde feminist writing, with an emphasis on hybrid and language-focused writing. Currently, the press operates as a non-hierarchical collaborative, publishing books and hosting literary events with attention to diversity in its roster of authors and editorial board.
Mary Biddinger is an American poet, editor, and academic.
Elizabeth Robinson is an American poet and professor, author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart, "Three Novels" "Also Known A,", and The Orphan and Its Relations. Her work has appeared in the "Conjunctions," "The Iowa Review," Colorado Review, the Denver Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and New American Writing. Her poems have been anthologized in "American Hybrid", "The Best of Fence", and Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 20130> With Avery Burns, Joseph Noble, Rusty Morrison, and Brian Strang, she co-edited 26 magazine. Starting in 2012, Robinson began editing a new literary periodical, Pallaksch. Pallaksch, with Steven Seidenberg. For 12 years, Robinson co-edited, with Colleen Lookingbill, the EtherDome Chapbook series which published chapbooks by emerging women poets. She co-edits Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims. She graduated from Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. She moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado where she taught at the University of Colorado and at Naropa University. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has twice served as the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.
Arc Publications, also known as Arc, is an independent publishing house in the UK, publishing contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation.
Helen Mort is a British poet and novelist. She is a five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007, and won the Manchester Poetry Prize Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. In the same year she was shortlisted for the Picador Prize and won the Norwich Café Writers' Poetry Competition with a poem called "Deer". She was the Derbyshire Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. In 2014, she won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for "Division Street".
Abi Curtis is a poet, writer, and lecturer at York St John University.
Knives, Forks and Spoons Press is an independent publishing house based in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, United Kingdom. It was established by Alec Newman in April 2010.
Robert Gavin Hampson FEA FRSA is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, before studying in London and Toronto and finally settling in London. Hampson taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 1973, and was Professor of Modern Literature there from 2000. From 2016 to 2019, he was Distinguished Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of English at Royal Holloway. He is currently Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London; Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway; and Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria. He remains an active member of the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. For his contributions to two distinct areas – contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad – he is, without a shadow of a doubt, a 'legend'.
Emily Berry (1981) is an English poet and writer.
Sarah Howe is a Chinese–British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.
Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, publisher and the founding editor of HappenStance Press. She has lived in Fife, Scotland, since 1977.