‘Small press, big dreams’: the indie that’s reviving publishing in Brum
We were delighted to be profiled in the innovative new local online newspaper The Dispatch. You can read the start to Dan Cave’s feature below, and the whole article on their Birmingham Dispatch website.
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the UK publishing industry is largely limited to three cities. You might have written a pacy, potboiler thriller, a 500 page state-of-the-nation novel, or a ground-breaking thesis. Chances are it’ll get picked up — if it doesn’t go straight on the slush pile — by a press in either London, Edinburgh or Oxford.
Why not Birmingham? Aside from our conveniently reachable location and vast size, this city has an impressive literary history. If not for us, there’d be no The Lord of the Rings or The Rotters’ Club. This is where W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice honed their crafts; this place produced Barbara Cartland and Kit de Waal. If nothing else, we’ve got range.
But we’ve yet to create a proper publishing sector, one that can stand toe-to-toe with the big three British centres for books. That’s why I’m intrigued by a small but scrappy publishing house that, against the odds, is making big waves from it’s little home in the Jewellery Quarter.
The Emma Press was set up by Emma Dai’an Wright in 2012, not in Brum but in Berkshire. However, it’s since she moved here in 2015 that the independent publisher has really made its mark, primarily producing poetry and children’s books with colourfully inked jackets – and bagging a steady stream of industry awards in the process.
The ambitious founder cut her teeth in London at Orion which is part of Hachette, one of the gigantic ‘big five’ publishing houses. But while working there during her twenties, she grew frustrated with what she found to be its imbalanced culture.
“I was very angry,” she tells me over Zoom. “I worked with nearly all women in publishing, but there were a few men at the top. I was thinking ‘who has the power in publishing?’”…..
