Fitzcarraldo Editions has hired Rachael Allen to launch a poetry list in 2025. Allen, who previously started the poetry list at Granta, where she published authors such as Will Harris and Sylvia Legris, and who publishes her own poetry with Faber & Faber, will run the new list alongside editor and production manager Joely Day.
Their first acquisitions include works by Matthew Rice, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Rebecca Tamás, Oluwaseun Olayiwola and Pulitzer Prize-winner Diane Seuss. Fitzcarraldo Editions’ poetry list will feature four to six books per year, and will also include poetry in translation. Art director Ray O’Meara is designing a new series for the list, to be unveiled later this year. Diane Seuss’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets and her new collection Modern Poetry will debut in the UK as part of the launch list. In frank, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, and Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Modern Poetry is a personal journey through poetic inheritance, moving from Keats and Hopkins through to Stevens and Plath. A scholarly upending of literary histories, it is self-deprecating, witty and formally groundbreaking. Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry. For frank: sonnets, she also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan. UK & Commonwealth excluding Canada rights to both collections were acquired from Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach is a sensual and sensitive collection bridging transatlantic cultures and foregrounding the semantics and somatics of love. Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a Nigerian-American dancer, choreographer, poet, and critic based in London. His poems have been published in the Guardian, Poetry Review and Granta. UK & Commonwealth exc. Canada rights were acquired from Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green Creatives. Strange Beach will also be published by Mensah Demary at Soft Skull in the US in 2025.
Matthew Rice’s Plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker-turned-poet, set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection moulding factory in Northern Ireland. Matthew Rice is from Belfast. His first book, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press, 2021) was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. World rights were acquired from Rice, with North American rights sold to Mensah Demary at Soft Skull.
POEMS by American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a subversive collection that skewers poetic precedent on precarity, race and pop-culture with comedy, craft, softness and sincerity. Sasha Debevec-McKenney is currently a 2023-2025 Poetry Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, Granta, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. UK & Commonwealth exc. Canada rights were acquired from Katie Cacouris at the Wylie Agency.
Rebecca Tamás’s second collection contains three sequences, including a series of poems on Joan of Arc, and a rewriting of the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King through an ecological lens. Rebecca Tamás is the author of WITCH (Penned in the Margins) and Strangers (Makina Books), which was longlisted for the Folio Prize. Rebecca’s writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Guardian, i, the London Review of Books and Granta. World rights were acquired from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander.
Of joining Fitzcarraldo Editions, Rachael Allen said: ‘I am hugely excited to be making space for poetry with a list that will publish essential work, at a publisher I have adored and admired since their beginning. These first poets we are publishing define the form, in different ways, and are all expansive and generous in their thinking and approach. We will continue to publish in this way, and the list will be defined by its authors, with ambitious, innovative and progressive poetry.’
On co-editing the poetry list, Joely Day added: ‘It’s long been a dream of mine to expand the Fitzcarraldo Editions list to include poetry. I couldn’t be happier to be co-editing the list with Rachael, whose work at Granta I so admired and whose own poetry I return to often.’
Publisher Jacques Testard said: ‘Rachael Allen is one of the leading poets of her generation and has been one of the most important publishers of poetry in Britain in the last decade through her work with Clinic and Granta. I’d always thought that in order to be a serious publishing house we needed a poetry list, and I’m very excited to see what she and Joely will be publishing in the coming years.’
The launch of the Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry list is funded by a donation from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, which recently became a minority shareholder in the publishing house via its commercial arm, Set Copyrights Limited. Clare Reihill, a trustee of the Foundation, has taken up a seat on Fitzcarraldo Editions’ board as a non-executive director.