How To Get Published – Fiction & Poetry

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+nto has been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2021, been named by The Telegraph, the New Statesman, The White Review & Times Literary Supplement as one of the best poetry books of 2021, as well as DIVA magazine’s Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out- Spoken Live, the UK’s premier poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She is the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press 2020-2022.

http://joelletaylor.co.uk/

Photo credit: Roman Manfredi

Sarah Crossan grew up in Dublin and emigrated to the U.K. when she was six years old. Her novels The Weight of Water and Apple and Rain were shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the CBI Book of the Year and in 2016, Sarah won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and CBI Book of the Year as well as the YA Book Prize, the CLiPPA Poetry Award, and many other awards for her novel, One. In 2017 the Dutch translation of One, Een, won the Dioraphte Literature Prize and the German translation, Eins, received a double shortlisting for the prestigious Deutsche Jugendliteraturpreis. Sarah’s novel Moonrise was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award, the CBI Book of the Year, the YA Book Prize and an Irish Book Award. In 2020 it won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. Her latest novel for teenagers is Toffee. In 2019 it won the Books Are My Bag award and was shortlisted for others. Her next YA novel Where The Heart Should Bewill be published in March 2024.

Between 2018 and 2020 Sarah was the fifth Laureate na nÓg (Irish Children’s Literature Laureate) and campaigned to promote poetry amongst teenagers. Her short stories and poems have been included in several collections and anthologies including Amnesty’s Here I Stand. She has also compiled her own anthology of poems called Tomorrow Is Beautiful. 

Sarah is the author of an adult novel Here Is The Beehive which published in 2020 and for which she has written the screenplay. The follow up to this adult debut, Hey, Zoey, will be out in summer 2024.  

Sarah’s novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and her debut, The Weight of Water, has been adapted for the stage five times. Several of her books have been optioned for film and TV.  

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher.

His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.

His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022.

In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry.

Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection.

In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton.

Website: https://anthonyanaxagorou.com/

Photo by Alessandro Furchino Capria

Aaron Kent is a poet and publisher from Cornwall, though he currently lives in Wales with his wife, Emma and their two young children. He runs the poetry press Broken Sleep Books and has recently finished his debut novel. Aaron is a working-class writer, and particularly wants to advocate for more working-class voices in literature. He had several poetry pamphlets published, his debut collection, Angels the Size of Houses, is available from Shearsman Books.

​He has had work published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Prototype, The North, The Scores, Wild Court, Blackbox Manifold, Butchers Dog, BAX (2020), and Prelude among others.

Aaron's poems have been translated into Persian, Cornish (Kernewek), French, and Latvian.

You can email him at aaronkent1989@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter where he is more than happy to chat about poetry, literature, jazz, hip hop, coffee, tv, and the works of J H Prynne.

Broken Sleep Books is a working-class indie publisher putting access to the arts at the forefront of what they do. They publish poetry and fiction.

Eloise Millar is one of the co-founders, alongside Sam Jordison, of GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS, an independent publisher committed to publishing daring, innovative fiction and narrative non-fiction.

Founded in 2012, they are particularly keen to support writers of great literary talent writing outside the norm, who push the boundaries of form and language. Over the past eight years, otheir authors – from Selby Wynn Schwartz (After Sappho), Lucy Ellmann (Ducks, Newburyport), Preti Taneja (We that are young), to Eimear McBride (A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing), Alex Pheby (Lucia), and beyond – have gone on to be longlisted, shortlisted, and the winners of over twenty of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, the Jan Michalski Prize, the Folio Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.

They are incredibly proud to say that in their short history, their authors have won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize not once, but twice. (Goldsmiths: Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing, 2013; Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport, 2019. Desmond Elliott: Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing, 2014; Preti Taneja, We that are young, 2018.)

They have been called a “small-but-mighty institution” (The Desmond Elliott Prize), a “tiny publisher… with a cartload of guts” (The Guardian), and “revolutionary” (The Telegraph).

Gyamfia Osei joined ANA in 2023 as a Literary Agent in the UK department. She was previously an agent at The Good Literary Agency, where she began building her list of authors. Recent successes include the shortlisting of Ebinehita Iyere’s Girlhood, Unfiltered (Knights Of, 2022) at the 2023 British Book Awards, and a 5-way auction for Quiet Storm by Kimberly Whittam (Usborne, 2023).

At ANA, Gyamfia will focus on developing the agency’s list of children’s authors, including the representation of ANA’s international children’s authors into the English language, while also representing a bespoke list of commercial fiction and narrative non-fiction.

In the Children’s space, Gyamfia would love to find contemporary stories that are full of heart and joy-driven books that celebrate kids from underrepresented backgrounds (think Clare Weze, Kimberly Whittam and Elle McNicoll). Funny, spooky middle-grade and YA horror are currently at the top of her list and she is also keen to read more teen projects (think Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and Glow Up Lara Bloom) this year. She is very interested in finding a graphic novel or illustrated project for either MG or YA readers.

In the adult fiction space, Gyamfia enjoys well-plotted, fast-paced narratives with authentic characters who lodge themselves in her mind long after she’s finished reading (think Big Little Lies, Verity and Girl A). She’s open to a broad range of genres, but would be particularly keen to see cosy crime, contemporary romance and tightly plotted domestic noir. Please note that Gyamfia doesn’t consider literary fiction and, in the commercial space, she is not hugely interested in high fantasy, trauma-focused stories or particularly gruesome horror.

In the adult non-fiction space, she would be happy to consider commercial narrative non-fiction and cultural history projects (think Brit(ish), It’s Not That Radical and Everything I Know About Love). She is very open when it comes to Children’s non-fiction but would be particularly interested to consider unique cookbooks aimed at young chefs, books exploring mental health/wellness and projects that bring the experiences of marginalised children to the forefront.

https://andrewnurnberg.com/team-member/gyamfia-osei/