Out-Spoken clinches collections from Fady Joudah and Azad Ashim Sharma

Indie publisher Out-Spoken Press has made a number of recent deals including collections from Fady Joudah and Azad Ashim Sharma. The titles form part of editor Anthony Anaxagorou’s 2024 publishing list, offering “insight, artfulness and integrity”. 

Anaxagorou, editor at the south London-based indie press, acquired UK and Irish rights to [...], described as an “urgent and timely” collection of poems by prominent Palestinian-American poet Joudah from Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon Literary. North American rights were acquired by Milkweed Editions. 

The publisher dubbed Joudah’s collection “a raw, weighted account engaging largely with the diasporic experience as a Palestinian-American, while also grappling with notions of home, war and outrage”. It is scheduled for March. Joudah is a winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Arab American Book Award. 

For the collection Boiled Owls, from south London-based writer and academic Sharma, Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights from Suresh Ariaratnam at Sprung Sultan. The collection demystifies drug addiction, alcoholism, depression and anxiety while considering capitalism and its resistance, the family and a writer’s compulsion to write, Out-Spoken said. It will be published in April. 

Out-Spoken has also bought collections from writers including Juana Adcock. Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights to Adcock’s debut collection, I Sugar The Bones, directly from the author. It is due in October.

Anaxagorou said: "With all the horrors taking place at the moment, the poets in our forthcoming list offer insight, artfulness and integrity, at a time when so many of us may feel withdrawn and hopeless. From war, displacement, climate breakdown and psychological trauma, these particular books reflect on what it means to not only be alive in the world, but to survive it.” 

The press, shortlisted for Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2020, 2021 and 2022, was recently awarded Arts Council England funding.