Jane Feaver, Editorial Manager, Poetry

To mark the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land, Faber will be publishing, among other things, a full colour edition of the manuscript – a reminder that, for almost as long, poetry has been the beating heart of this publishing house. The poetry list continues to feed and flourish on that legacy, while pushing out new shoots, discovering unbroken ground and unheard voices.

A recent reading by five Faber poets shows the model in action: Paul Muldoon, who was first published by the company fifty years ago, launched his new collection, Howdie-Skelp, alongside Maurice Riordan and his latest, Shoulder Tap (Maurice, who has a thirty-year history with the firm); joining them were representatives of a younger generation: Jack Underwood with his second collection, A Year in the New Life, which we’re delighted to find nominated for this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, and Emily Berry, whose forthcoming third collection, Unexhausted Time (a PBS Choice) we are publishing in the spring.

In the same line-up, an entirely new voice to the list – Victoria Adukwei Bulley – read from her remarkable debut, Quiet, out next summer, poems that explore questions of interiority and selfhood, and the telling distance between white and black noise.

The list is international in its reach. We are proud in the last few years to have brought into the fold Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz, whose remarkable debut collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, appears under the Faber imprint next year.

Writers in translation are revitalized, whether from as far back as Gillian Clarke’s lucid rendering of The Gododdin and Simon Armitage’s electric version of The Owl and the Nightingale, or in Michael Hofmann’s wonderfully sympathetic translation of the twentieth-century German poet, Gottfried Benn. In this vein, we are delighted to be publishing the collected translations of Seamus Heaney (the first of four Heaney titles projected over the next few years), poems extraordinary in their range and intellectual curiosity, and an example to us all.

Lynn Gaspard, Saqi Books

For over thirty years, Saqi Books has released seminal, cutting-edge works about the Middle East and North Africa, offering an independent platform for writers and artists from around the world. We have taken the lead in making available banned works by novelists and political dissidents from the region – works reflecting progressive attitudes and often by minority writers (ethnic, religious, sex or their gender). These include groundbreaking works by Muslim feminists, historians and social anthropologists, such as Fatema Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil, Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes, Arab Jews by Abbas Shiblak and Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East by Brian Whitaker.

One might wonder how a poetry collection about the British butch lesbian counterculture found its way onto our list. In fact, it is a natural extension of our ambition since 1983 to champion fierce, powerful writing by authors outside the mainstream. Indeed, our progressive nonfiction imprint The Westbourne Press (TWP) was established in 2012 to release intellectually daring, topical and intelligent works on the leading issues of our time – books that inform us about the world we live in. C+nto sits alongside TWP titles including Sex and Punishment by Eric Berkowitz, Misogynies by Joan Smith and Asian Britain by Susheila Nasta, among others that question orthodox attitudes to sex, gender, race, class and colonial legacies.

Under our Saqi imprint, we have translated the works of numerous key Arab poets, such as Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Nazik al-Malaika, and published bestselling collections, including Classical Poems by Arab Women. However, before C+nto, The Westbourne Press had only released one poetry collection: I Am Nobody’s Nigger by Dean Atta (shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2014).

Joelle’s work was first brought to our attention by Sabrina Mahfouz in Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making it Happen. Joelle’s performances at events to celebrate the book’s release were electrifying and totally transfixing. Every once in a while, as a publisher, if you are lucky, you come across the work of a writer that rocks you to your core, that you know will make a difference. Joelle Taylor is one such writer. C+nto is a masterpiece; it was impossible not to publish it. It records memories of lost people and places, and so poignantly relays the pain and violence endured by butch lesbians – an experience not yet widely recognised. But Joelle’s writing is ultimately full of hope. She writes about love: the love between women, the love and solidarity found within the butch community, the love that we each deserve, regardless of our sexual orientation or background.

We cannot think of a writer more deserving of a T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisting than Joelle, who has dedicated her working life to the advancement of poetry and spoken word. C+nto is a poetic tour de force, earth-shattering in its impact and vital in its representation of a community increasingly losing space within the mainstream.

Jane Commane, Nine Arches Press

One of the great pleasures of being a publisher is that you also have the privilege of working with a poet over a period of time and observing their change and progression. I feel very lucky to have this unique close-up view of a poet’s creative process; the chance to see their ideas take shape, how they develop or build on the foundations of a first collection, how they seek out new routes, inspiration or try out new forms and approaches for future poems and possible future books.

I first encountered Daniel’s poetry at Ledbury Poetry Festival’s open mic in about 2010. The poem he read, which would later appear in his debut poetry collection (absence has a weight of its own, 2012) left me reeling; his poetry was precise and direct, full of unshakeable imagery. By happenstance, he’d just also sent a few poems to Under the Radar, our flagship magazine. Following this came a proposed pamphlet that we worked on and was later published as his first book.

Whilst debuts are of course important, I’m also rather fascinated by what a poet has in their imaginative storeroom – by what might be further down the line for them and their poetics. It’s personal too – I’m also a poet, wrestling with many of these same questions.

For some poets a second or third collection might take a wildcard approach; after setting out their stall in book one or two, rather than continue further along their original path they seek to detonate those previous approaches altogether; reinvent their poetry and, having got their confidence by previous collections, use this as a creative leaping-off point.

For others, a poetry collection is a continuation in a body of work. Here the stakes are similarly high, and this is not necessarily a less risky, innovative or exciting process. The poet continues to revisit the topics and ideas that interest, trouble, and fuel them and their creative process. They circumnavigate, seeking a new way into those themes they have visited before, almost as if to take them by surprise, to defamiliarise and to find that there remains more still to say – and that new forms may enable ways to say it.

These processes are not necessarily oppositional; they come from the same place of creative reinvention, departure and return (the push and pull instinct that powers so many of our creative impulses) and the taking of new routes, even if through a previously known territory, that both approaches embrace in their own way. In many ways, Daniel Sluman’s considered approach in creating single window takes in the best of both.

I first saw the poems that would crystalise into the poems in single window in 2017. What was immediately striking about them, from those earliest stages, was the development of the distinctive form that Daniel has created here; the poems themselves gathered movement, claimed a dynamic space on the page. Something which, through progressive drafts, became an increasingly radical, beautiful form alive on the page.

Paired with the images that depict Daniel and Emily’s lives during this time, the whole collection ultimately became a vivid and incomparable ‘hybrid journal’. The documentation of experience through both poetry and image in single window is also an intrinsic, powerful, re-centering of voice, and is indelibly connected to a whole remarkable thread of poems that Daniel has been writing since the early 2010s, and yet also truly representative of a point, or indeed year, in time.