Hamish Hamilton's Five Dials mag closes after 16 years

Hamish Hamilton’s literary magazine Five Dials has closed after 16 years to “make space for all the new talent fizzing at the margins”, the publisher said. 

The digital publication was co-founded by Hamish Hamilton publishing director Simon Prosser and writer Craig Taylor, and collaborated with various literary festivals over the years. The 66 issues brought together short fiction, essays, letters, poetry, interviews and reporting from around the world alongside contemporary illustrations.

A statement circulated to the magazine’s subscribers revealed that “after a decade and a half, we think the time has come to pass the torch – to close Five Dials and make space for all the new talent fizzing at the margins, where we once stood, ready to forge new channels and find new forms. We can’t wait to see what the next generation will do”. 

Prosser and Taylor wrote: “We founded Five Dials in 2008 – two years after Twitter and two years before Instagram – as one of a new generation of arts magazines, in that era when internet culture was colliding with literary culture in all kinds of exciting, alarming, unexpected ways.  

“We wanted to create something which would be free to all, available online from anywhere in the world, and which would gather the best of the old and the new in surprising, playful combinations.” 

Prosser and Taylor said that instead of paying printing costs they “explored the possibilities of digital publishing and found a perfect form: the humble PDF”, offering “a wry, honest, democratic, self-deprecating and open-hearted voice”.

The statement continued: “Seeing someone wildly talented and criminally underappreciated getting their flowers – it never gets old. As the years passed, we began to travel worldwide to launch issues in collaboration with festivals – in Cornwall, in Montreal, in Amsterdam, in Jaipur – shaping the issues to reflect their launch places and gathering new readers along the way.”   

The news follows a year of narrowing landscape of literary coverage: the White Review went on hiatus, both the Cardiff Review and Gal-Dem closed, while Bad Form stopped its online publishing. 

The Bookseller has reached out to PRH for comment.

The full archive of Five Dials will remain available at penguin.co.uk/five-dials-archive.