Penned in the Margins

15/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 OUT FOR AIR by

Out for Air is the exhilarating first collection of poetry by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd.

Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where ‘the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality’. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering.

Todd rewires T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan’s ‘silky streets’ and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.

11/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 AN OCEAN OF STATIC by 🌊 ✨

An Ocean of Static transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text.

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

In this long-awaited poetry debut by award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter, cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and of animals, of indigenous people and of migrants, of strange noises and of phantom islands.

10/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 THE ENGLISH SUMMER by 🍃

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize
A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A ‘pie-faced’ St George upstaged by the horse.

The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus. This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed. Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins’ startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.

07/07/2024

On this day in 2017 our merry band of creative medievalists took over Shoreditch Town Hall for a two-day performance cycle of Fair Field, based on the 14th-century masterpiece Piers Plowman.

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Written almost 650 years ago by William Langland, Piers Plowman enters the mind of a wanderer, Will, as he falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, dreams of a ‘fair field full of folk’ and embarks on a quest to find Truth. Conceived and produced by multi-award-winning arts company Penned in the Margins, Fair Field re-imagined Piers Plowman for the twenty-first century through site-responsive performances, an exhibition at the National Poetry Library, podcasts, educational workshops and more. Fair Field invites you to enter the psychedelic dreamscape of Piers Plowman — to explore a world of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis that is uncannily like our own.

Photos Harpreet Kalsi

07/07/2024

On this day in 2017 our merry band of creative medievalists took over for a two-day performance cycle of Fair Field, based on the 14th-century masterpiece Piers Plowman.

🎭

Written almost 650 years ago by William Langland, Piers Plowman enters the mind of a wanderer, Will, as he falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, dreams of a ‘fair field full of folk’ and embarks on a quest to find Truth. Conceived and produced by multi-award-winning arts company Penned in the Margins, Fair Field re-imagined Piers Plowman for the twenty-first century through site-responsive performances, an exhibition at the National Poetry Library, podcasts, educational workshops and more. Fair Field invites you to enter the psychedelic dreamscape of Piers Plowman — to explore a world of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis that is uncannily like our own.

Photos Harpreet Kalsi

07/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 THE FEEL-GOOD MOVIE OF THE YEAR by

Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats and his father’s skeleton clocks.

Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the ‘tidy hem’ of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something ‘beyond our squeaky comprehension’. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up.

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We’re proud to have published SIX books by Luke - three collections of poetry and three play texts. His new show JOY is on tour from this month.

05/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE by

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville’s image of the whale – the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van.
The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families – from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world.

04/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 FERAL BOROUGH by 🍃

Set in the urban pastoral of an East London postcode, Feral Borough asks what it means to call a place home, and how best to share that home with its non-human inhabitants.
Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as ‘feral’, recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road.
In this subtle, captivating book – part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir – Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection.

03/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 OF SEA by

A remarkable book in praise of marine fauna, Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone.

In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music.

🐚 🌊 🌿

Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.
Rebecca Tamás ()

[Burnett’s] stunning new collection explores the sea - its creatures, sounds, language. Many pieces are meant to be sung, or clicked (like a beetle) and it cumulates into an epic maritime lyric.
Sinéad Gleeson

02/07/2024

🌞 Summer sale focus 🔍 NOTES ON THE SONNETS by

🏆 Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021

Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.

A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.

Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard’s affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse.

Just £4.99 in our Summer sale

01/07/2024

Our 🌞 summer sale 🌞 starts today! Get 50% off our innovative, genre-bending, award-winning books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction while stocks last 💨

Link in bio or type pennedinthemargins.co.uk into your browser! 😜

Sale ends 15 July 2024

01/07/2024

Our 🌞 SUMMER SALE 🌞 starts today with 50% off all books - from award-winning poetry to genre-bending fiction and non-fiction.

Get in 👉 https://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/category/books/offers/

17/05/2024

How far would you go to resist oppression? What would you choose to remember, and what to forget?

On this day in 2017 we presented the premiere of No Dogs, No Indians by Siddhartha Bose at Brighton Festival.

It is 1932 in occupied Bengal. A young revolutionary prepares to storm a whites-only club in Chittagong, an act of defiance that will end in her taking her own life. The sign above the club reads No Dogs, No Indians. Decades later, an aspiring intellectual born in post-independence Kolkata is in love with all things British: Shakespeare, cricket, The Beatles. But as he contemplates the past and imagines his children’s future, he begins to question his own identity. Now in 2017, a man returns from London on the news of his father’s death. In the New India, he encounters steel magnates, supermodels and tech millionaires, but is haunted by ghosts from the past.

Directed by our creative associate Russell Bender, No Dogs, No Indians starred Komal Amin, Archana Ramaswamy, Omar Kahn & Ashraf Ejjbair, supported by a talented creative/design team.

20/11/2023

Get 50% off award-winning poetry, fiction and non-fiction in our Black Friday sale, now on! 🖤

We believe in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. Discover our award-winning publications and pioneering live productions.

08/11/2023

Starting in January, our editor Tom Chivers is teaching an online course for Poetry School. It’s called Transreading Creative Risk and each week he will take a different book or project from the Penned in the Margins back catalogue as inspiration for new writing.

Visit the Poetry School more info and to sign up.

Explore what creative risk means to you, and how to manage and deploy it, with poetry publisher and performing arts company Penned in the Margins.

01/08/2023

Our Summer Sale is now over. We sold a whopping 302 books. Thank you, dear readers!

As always, here's our Top Ten :-)

1. Improvised Explosive Device by Arji Manuelpillai
2. Panic Response by John McCullough
3. Feral Borough by Meryl Pugh
4. Out for Air by Olly Todd
5. The English Summer by Holly Hopkins
6. WITCH by Rebecca Tamás
7. The Old Weird Albion by Justin Hopper
8. Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard
9. Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough
10. Spacecraft by John McCullough

29/06/2023

Our Summer Sale launches today! 🌞 Add our award-winning books of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction to your “to read” pile with a hefty 50% off all titles. While stocks last! Sale ends 31 July. Free delivery on orders over £25 (UK only)📚

Sale on now: https://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

18/05/2023

Thrilled to announce that The English Summer by Holly Hopkins has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize! Congrats Holly 🌞

You can get your copy direct from us 👉 https://bit.ly/3We3gtc

20/12/2022

It's the end of an era.

18 years since we began as a poetry reading series in a converted railway arch in south London, Penned in the Margins is taking an indefinite hiatus, with no new books or productions planned from next year.

Read our full statement on the link below

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who has read our books, attended our shows, and engaged with or supported our work in any way.

x

From January 2023 independent publisher and arts producing company Penned in the Margins will cease to publish or produce new work.

12/12/2022

Poet Holly Hopkins talks to Roisin Dunnett about robots, medieval castles and writing her Forward Prize-shortlisted debut collection.

Poet Holly Hopkins talks to Roisin Dunnet about robots, medieval castles and writing her Forward Prize-shortlisted debut collection.

05/12/2022

Holly Hopkins' debut collection is one of the Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2022!

'The English Summer,' writes Rishi Dastidar, 'offers beguiling meditations on modern Britain. Hopkins’s language is deft and witty, with Explanation for Those Who Don’t Know Love destined to become a modern classic: “I have a child and am more important / than childless people. // I am two people and have an extra vote. / You cannot comprehend our bond”.

Order your copy online here: https://bit.ly/3FrDvit

Meditations on modern Britain, 100 q***r poems, and evocations of the natural world are among this year’s standout collections

28/11/2022

Discover genre-bending fiction & non-fiction with a sense of place 🌍

Last day of our Black Friday sale!

⚫️ Up to 50% off all books
⚫️ Free UK delivery if you spend over £25

👉 pennedinthemargins.co.uk

21/11/2022

Get up to 50% off all titles in our Black Friday Sale!

📚 Award-winning poetry
📚 Genre-bending fiction
📚 Captivating place writing
📚 Cutting-edge literary criticism

Sale ends 28.11
Free UK delivery on orders over £25

We believe in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. Discover our award-winning publications and pioneering live productions.

14/11/2022

Happy Publication Day, Meryl Pugh! 🎉

Her non-fiction debut FERAL BOROUGH is out now - essential reading for anyone curious about the flora & fauna that inhabit our cities & edgelands 🍃

Order your copy direct from us 👉 bit.ly/3TAzPi0

09/11/2022

Now available to order: FERAL BOROUGH by Meryl Pugh 🍂 https://bit.ly/3A2fBXH

"A subtle, heartfelt and affecting book about home, the city and the self," - Rebecca Tamás

"Meryl Pugh’s writing conjures a wild city full of wonder among the everyday, and urges us to find that wonder for ourselves from our own doorsteps." - Kerri Andrews

"This is a most democratic bestiary. Skylarks and buzzards enjoy equal billing with hawthorn and common wood pigeons. Bluebells, six-toed cats, an escaped boa constrictor... At its heart is a simple message: take notice of what’s around you and your life will be enriched." - Matt Brown

28/10/2022

Arji Manuelpillai reads ‘Mistaken Identity’ from his ‘unflinching’ new collection of poetry Improvised Explosive Device - out now! 👉 bit.ly/3W9OxPA

Video by Jamie Macdonald
Cover design by Zigmunds Lapsa

24/10/2022

Congratulations to Arji Manuelpillai on his 'unflinching' debut collection of poems, Improvised Explosive Device, published today!

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Order your copy direct from us: https://bit.ly/3splhqy

06/10/2022

Happy National Poetry Day! 🎊

Why not celebrate by pre-ordering the remarkable first collection by Arji Manuelpillai - a PBS Recommendation for Autumn 2022.

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence, written through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families.

"A work of radical empathy ... unflinching, uncomfortable and uncommonly brave"
RISHI DASTIDAR

The first 50 copies are signed by the author and come with a postcard of a specially commissioned artwork.

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville’s image of the whale – the terror beneath ...

14/09/2022

On Saturday evening poet and musician Belinda Zhawi performs IN TRANSIT - her new riverine spoken word commission for Literature Works in the Transit Shed on Exeter Quayside 🌊 Tickets are free but booking essential:

Experience a new site-specific performance by poet and musician Belinda Zhawi. In Transit will share stories and histories from the River Exe, probing themes of colonialism, migration, industry and the environment. Tracing the movement of tides, and the movement of people, animals and goods, this me...

08/08/2022

We are hiring! Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us as Sales & Marketing Assistant (part-time). Deadline for applications is 26 August.

Sales and Marketing Assistant (part-time: 2 or 2.5 days a week)London£9,200 p.a. or £11,500 p.a. (£23,000 pro rata)