Fitzcarraldo Editions hires Rachael Allen to launch new poetry list featuring Rebecca Tamás and Diane Seuss

Fitzcarraldo Editions has hired Rachael Allen to launch a poetry list featuring works by Rebecca Tamás, Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss, Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Matthew Rice and Sasha Debevec-McKenney.

Allen started the poetry list at Granta, where she published authors like Will Harris and Sylvia Legris, and publishes her own poetry with Faber & Faber. She will run the new Fitzcarraldo list alongside editor and production manager Joely Day.

The list is funded by a donation from the T S Eliot Foundation, which recently became a minority shareholder in the publishing house via its commercial arm, Set Copyrights Limited. Clare Reihill – a trustee of the Foundation – has also taken up a seat on the Fitzcarraldo board, as a non-executive director.

"Rachael Allen is one of the leading poets of her generation and has been one of the most important publishers of poetry in Britain in the last decade through her work with Clinic and Granta," publisher Jacques Testard said. "I’d always thought that in order to be a serious publishing house we needed a poetry list, and I’m very excited to see what she and Joely will be publishing in the coming years."

Four to six books per year will be published on the list, which will also include poetry in translation. Meanwhile, art director Ray O’Meara is designing a new series for the list, to be unveiled later this year.

Allen and Day acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to two collections by Seuss from Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press. Seuss’ 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets and her new collection, Modern Poetry, will debut in the UK as part of the launch list.

"In frank, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, and Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare," the synopsis says. Meanwhile, Modern Poetry is described as "a personal journey through poetic inheritance" and as "a scholarly upending of literary histories".

Day and Allen also bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Olayiwola’s "sensual and sensitive collection" Strange Beach from Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green Creatives. The collection will also be published by Mensah Demary at Soft Skull in the US in 2025.

Moreover, the pair acquired Rice’s Plastic, a book-length poem on "the life of the industrial worker-turned-poet". World rights were acquired from the author direct, with North American rights sold to Demary at Soft Skull. 

In addition, Day and Allen acquired American poet Debevec-McKenney’s POEMS, a collection that "skewers poetic precedent on precarity, race and pop-culture with comedy, craft, softness and sincerity". UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, were acquired from Katie Cacouris at the Wylie Agency.

Finally, they jointly acquired Tamás’ second collection, which contains a series of poems on Joan of Arc, a rewriting of the Fisher King legend and a third sequence. World rights were acquired from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander.