Carcanet
| Publishing House | |
| Founded | 1969 |
| Headquarters | Manchester, England |
|
Key people
|
Michael Schmidt |
| Products | books |
| Services | Publishing |
| Website | www.carcanet.co.uk |
Carcanet Press is a publisher, primarily of poetry, based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1969 by Michael Schmidt.
In 2000 it was named the Sunday Times millennium Small Publisher of the Year. Four of its authors have received Nobel Prizes, nine have received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and six have received Pulitzer Prizes, among many other honours. Carcanet publishes a comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation.
Carcanet was originally a literary magazine, founded in 1962. Michael Hind, a member of the original editorial board, recalls how the idea was to 'collect together and publish as a periodical poetry, short fiction, and "intelligent criticism of all the arts"; there were to be both student and senior members' contributions.' The intention was to link Oxford and Cambridge universities. Its name is an English word which means "a collar of jewels", diminutive of "carcan" (an obsolete word for a collar used for punishment), pronounced "kar'ka-net". (A much earlier use of the word was in The Carcanet, an anthology published in 1828.)
The magazine 'Carcanet' had fallen on hard times by October 1967 when Michael Schmidt, a newly arrived undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, took it over. Times got harder still. In 1969 as a swansong the magazine produced a few pamphlets: poetry by new writers from Britain, India and the United States, and a book of translations. The reviews were encouraging. In 1970-1971 Carcanet Press became Ltd. The swansong continues, the bird having upped sticks and left Matthew Arnold's (and Robert Graves's) South Hinksey, Oxford, for Thomas de Quincey's Manchester.
Carcanet enjoys Arts Council England support. Its list includes, alongside new writers from all over the world, major authors from the twentieth and earlier centuries.
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