Company spotlight: Chatto & Windus

Parisa Ebrahimi is talking about arriving at Chatto & Windus as a young editor. “I came into the job with a passion for poetry,” she says, then stops and laughs. “If that doesn’t sound too wanky.”

Well, no. In fact, it is fortuitous because since 2010 she has been tasked with reinvigorating Chatto’s venerable poetry list. The imprint has a formidable heritage but, Ebrahimi admits, since Andrew Motion left his role as its poetry editor in the ‘90s, it “had not really been a priority”.   

Since she has taken over, Ebrahimi has gone about seeking fresh talent, signing up the likes of Somerset Maugham-winner Adam O’Riordan and the Forward and T S Eliot Prize shortlistee Helen Mort. 

She says: “I wanted to actively acquire new poets with the aim of establishing a list of the best exciting poets today. If it’s not too hubristic, I want to have a list that every new young poet wants to be on; a list synonymous with not just quality but diversity, richness and feeling.”

So why should a hip young poet go to Chatto rather than other big beasts such as Faber, Carcanet or Picador? Ebrahimi says: “Most poets want editorial close reading, which we do. It’s not just about the content but the whole package. You can’t really just bring out a nice little volume of poetry anymore. The design has to be compelling and there is an upsurge in the infrastructure around the publishing—it’s about promoting things with digital, audio and events.”

She adds: “There is some distinction between written and performed poetry, which is a bit false. But I do think poets must be out there reading [at events], doing audio. They must be heard.” Chatto is doing its part: it is launching an audio newsletter and new microsite with recordings of its poets, and has brokered a season of Chatto poets to air on BBC 6Music, beginning in early June. 

The poetry sector is having something of a moment. Sales through Nielsen BookScan’s Poetry category were up 8% year on year in 2014 by value (to £8.5m), and thus far in 2015 are 9.9% up on the comparable period in 2014. Ebrahimi is heartened, but realistic: “No one has ever arrived at a career in poetry—writing it or editing it—to make money.” 

Poetry please

Ebrahimi was born in Iran but her family moved to London—and never returned—when she was just nine months old. One of her favourite childhood books was a Puffin anthology called I Like This Poem. She says: “It had a tremendous effect on me. It demystified poetry. It said: ‘Here are some poems, take it at your own pace.’ It has affected my whole philosophy on publishing, as a lot of people say: ‘I don’t read poetry, I don’t understand it.’ But there can be nothing more accessible than poetry. We should be driving this message home: poetry is not difficult, arcane or elitist.” 

Love of poetry led her to study literature at King’s College London and Sussex. During and after university, she was a bookseller at Hatchard’s: “It was the best—apart from the pay—the most fun years of my life. Hatchard’s was my real university, it taught me everything I needed to know about books and how to sell them.” She moved to Chatto in 2007 and, in addition to poetry, publishes across fiction and non-fiction, including travel writer turned Graham Greene-esque novelist Lawrence Osborne, Goncourt Prize-winner Atiq Rahimi and Peter Ackroyd. 

But ultimately, poetry remains her passion: “It’s an exciting time. I think there are so many new ways to explore methods of publishing poetry. We really want to create a forward-facing publishing philosophy for what can be a kind of a fusty, old-fashioned artform.”

Three to Watch

Sarah Howe
Loop of jade
Chatto, 9780701188696, £10
Chatto’s lead poetry début for 2015 is by Hong Kong-born English/Chinese editor and academic Howe. Out on 7th May, her book explores gender and dual nationalities.

Helen Mort
Division Street
Chatto, 9780701186845, £12
Sheffield-born, 29-nine-year-old Mort’s poems of conflict and home comforts in the North—the title is a street in her home city—was shortlisted for the 2014 T S Eliot Prize. Mort is the Derbyshire Poet Laureate.  

Liz Berry
Black Country
Chatto, 978701188573, £10
Much of Berry’s 2014 début—which won that year’s Forward Prize for Best First Collection—is written in a Midlands dialect. Now living in Birmingham, Berry is a poetry editor for Ambit magazine.