OUR LATEST BOOK RELEASES
Welcome to the Shearsman Books website. Shearsman is a very active small press based in Oxfordshire, England, publishing mainly poetry. We publish around 50 books and two issues of Shearsman magazine every year. The list of authors is completely international, although there are of course more British authors than those from elsewhere. We have a very strong translation list, with a particular emphasis on Hispanic poetry — whether from Latin America or the Peninsula — but we also have fascinating books from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Scandinavia, Turkey, and elsewhere. Use the menu bar at the top of the page to get around, and explore the shop (far left in the menu bar), where you can find all of our titles that are in print.
FORTHCOMING BOOKS
FEATURED AUTHORS
NATALIA LITVINOVA
Natalia Litvinova was born in Belarus and emigrated with her family to Argentina at the age of 10. She lives in Buenos Aires where she co-edits the Editorial Llanten publishing house. She has published 10 volumes of poetry in Spanish, and also a number of translations from Russian to Spanish. Her most recent book is Soñka, manos de oro, published in 2022 by the Madrid publisher La Bella Varsovia. In 2024, Litvinova won the Lumen Prize for her novel Luciérnaga.
Basket of Braids (2024) is her first collection in English.
ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947, the year India became independent and Lahore became a part of the newly formed nation of Pakistan. His family – caught up in the enormous human dislocation that followed after Independence – abandoned Lahore for the city of Allahabad, where his father set up a dental practice. His poems are coded messages from the unconscious, but there is an exceedingly conscious hand that crafts them. Initially misrepresented as a surrealist, he moved from the Beat-influenced extemporisations of his late teens to a spare, controlled lyric line. His poems derive their power from what they leave out as much as what they say, as if a host of ghost sentences stood behind each one on the page; and he is a master of the short lyric of a dozen or fewer lines. Author of four collections of poems as well as translations from the Prakrit, and of Kabir, Mehrotra edited
The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1991), possibly the most influential collection of Indian poetry in English to date, and also edited Arun Kolatkar's posthumous
Collected Poems in English
(Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His book of essays,
Partial Recall, was published in 2012. He lives in Allahabad and Dehradun.
NATHANIEL TARN
Nathaniel Tarn (1928–2024) in Paris of British-Lithuanian and French-Romanian parents, educated in France, Belgium and England, obtaining degrees from Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Chicago; he emigrated to the United States in 1970, where he taught at American universities until his retirement. Although he is perhaps best-known these days as a poet and essayist, he was also an anthropologist, with a particular interest in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, and a translator of the highest order (see above all his versions of Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu and Victor Segalen's Stelae). His first collection of poetry appeared in 1964), and was followed the next year by his appearance in the seventh volume of the Penguin Modern Poets series. Three more collections followed in London, during which time he also became editor of the remarkable Cape Editions series of seminal modern texts: poetry, prose, anthropology, drama, many of them pioneering translations. He emigrated to the United States in 1970, after which only two more collections — the important volume
A Nowhere for Vallejo and the ambitious book-length poem
Lyrics for the Bride of God
— were to appear in the UK. Thereafter, with the exception of his Shearsman publications and a single volume from Salt, all of his work appeared in the USA, most significantly:
The House of Leaves (Black Sparrow),
Atitlan/Alashka (with Janet Rodney, Brillig Works),
At the Western Gates (Tooth of Time Books) and
Selected Poems 1950-2000 (Wesleyan University Press). There is also a significant volume of essays in
Views from the Weaving Mountain
(University of New Mexico Press). Tarn's work is remarkable for expansiveness and its willingness to absorb material from very disparate sources – in this, it owes something to the examples of Pound and Olson, but also a lot to the author's own anthropological training, his knowledge of other languages and his many interests, in areas such as archaeology. He passed away a few days short of his 96th birthday, in England.