Bloodaxe Books

Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry. Bloodaxe has published British, Irish, American, European and Commonwealth of Nations writers. As well as publishing famous names in literature, Bloodaxe has discovered and helped establish the reputations of many new British writers. It has published nearly 1000 books by more than 300 writers, with an annual output of around 30 new titles. The Bloodaxe list has more women poets than any other British publisher and the most substantial list of Caribbean and Black British poets. Bloodaxe authors have won virtually every major literary award for which poetry is eligible, including four Nobel Prizes.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in 1978 in Newcastle upon Tyne by Neil Astley, who is still editor and managing director. Astley was joined in 1982 by chairman Simon Thirsk. Bloodaxe moved its editorial office to Northumberland and its sales office to Bala, North Wales, in 1997.

In 2013 Astley deposited the Bloodaxe Books archive at Newcastle University's Robinson Library, Special Collections.

The growth of Bloodaxe and other specialist poetry publishers coincided with the emergence of a new generation of British and Irish poets, mostly born in the 50s and early 60s, many first published by these imprints. Twenty of these writers were later tagged New Generation Poets in a promotion organised by the Poetry Society in 1994, but this particular grouping was artificial and should not be taken as a critical guide, for it excluded several key figures from that generation, including Jackie Kay, Ian McMillan, Sean O'Brien, Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. The first anthology to represent this new generation was Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry (1993), edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley, which became a school set text. Sean O'Brien’s The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 1998) is his account of poetry in the post-war period, from the generation of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes to the new poets of the 80s and 90s.

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