A brand-new publishing house – almost!

Ings Press will be a new name to most people but that doesn’t mean it has come from nowhere. The precursor of Ings Press, Ings Poetry, began a decade ago, when Wharfedale Poets, a group I am part of, wanted to publish an anthology. I put myself forward to do the job and found that I loved it.

I continued to publish anthologies on behalf of groups I was involved in and for friends who wished to see their poetry (and sometimes fiction, history and memoir) in print form. Although such publications were mainly for friends and family, I will make some of them available through Ings Press.

Through the work I had carried out in publishing around twenty books in this way, I began talking with a group of friends, fellow poets and spoken word-night hosts, including Gill and Mark Connors, about working with a wider group of poets whose work we admired. From this liaison sprang Yaffle Press, which has produced over fifty titles to date.

I continue to work as part of Yaffle Press but in my wider conversations, it occurred to me that I would also like to be involved with some other authors whose projects did not, perhaps fit, so comfortably into the Yaffle mould. I was particularly keen to work with my initial two authors, Colin Speakman and Ryall Hill, both of whom I will introduce in future blogs but I am excited to be bringing into being a career-spanning Collected Poems from a writer legendary in other fields, and volume of short stories celebrating my own home city and recent capital of culture, Bradford.