Welcome to the new Waterloo Press blog – and to our stunning new website! Thanks to the generosity of Arts Council England, we’ve spent this last year refreshing our website and revitalising our list. As you can see from our sleek new livery, we’ve even indulged in a little rebranding!
After much tweaking, debugging and polishing, we are proud to officially unveil the site, designed by the talented and unfailingly good-humoured Diane Wallace. We hope you will agree that our new online home is a joy to behold and a pleasure to navigate.
We are also thrilled to officially launch our new ventures: LIT UP, our ACE-funded mentoring and publishing programme for poets of colour; Waterloo Drama, our growing list of scripts and monologues; and a bevy of other wonderful new titles from UK and international poets.
LIT UP
Featuring the gifted voices of Uzma Ali, Jay Délise, Wajid Hussein, Kev Inn, Arun Jeetoo, Des Mannay, Catherine Okoronkwo, Sea Sharp and Merrie Joy Williams, the LIT UP programme will result in nine collections/pamphlets over the next six months, as well as a host of blogs, videos and live events. Initiated and co-managed by WP Director Simon Jenner, writer, mentor/editor and diversity consultant Monika Akila Richards, WP editors and poets Naomi Foyle and John O’Donoghue, and WP playwright and performance coach Carole Bremson, LIT UP is intended to help us diversify both our list and the British poetry publishing world.
Black Cotton by Sea Sharp and Open Windows by Merrie Joy Williams, the first two LIT UP titles, will be launched on Saturday Nov 30th at the Poetry Cafe in London. Please join us if you can – places can be booked here. Meantime, do check out the VIDEOS page of the website for a taster of the talent on offer!
Waterloo Drama and Monologues
In 2012 we published the first Waterloo drama. This was director, West End actor and poet Carole Bremson’s A Midsummer Night’s Madness, a brilliant filleting and conflation of Shakespeare’s sylvan scenes with a little help from J. M. Barrie’s happy ending to Hamlet. You’ll have to read it if you didn’t see one of its several productions, or indeed the short film of it too (still available).
But we didn’t want it end there and embarked on more titles. Simon Moorhead’s scripts for Protect and Survive came out in May 2019 (you can find the podcast performances on The Other 1%), and after years of planning, Bruntwood-prize long-lister Jonathan Brown’s renowned The Well Trilogy, produced to huge acclaim from 2011-19.
Though renowned as a poetry publisher, we’re not just refusing to be pigeonholed. There’s a rationale with some of the founder poets being dramatists too. It’s not just Carole Bremson who trained initially as an actor, but Naomi Foyle, whose acclaimed play The Stranger’s Wife featured in the Bush Theatre’s Sixty-Six Books in 2011. Simon Jenner too apart from his frantic theatre reviewing has just written a clutch of plays and radio scripts, three of which feature in Simon Moorhead’s curated volume. Which also features Gareth Strachan, creator of Radio Foreplay, Have a Very Brexit Christmas podcast…. So don’t get us started.
Waterloo aims to provide drama scripts for plays newly-produced together with a few instant classics people have clamoured for, for years. More are forthcoming. Waterloo Drama’s small as yet but we‘re staging huge things in the round.
And a Fleet of Other New Titles!
In our busy harbour of pre-launch activity we’ve also produced four new titles we’re tremendously proud of: Blue Wallpaper by Robert Hamberger, Highly Commended in this year’s Forward Prizes; Each Other, from Seamus Heaney Prize shortlisted poet and memoirist Clare Best; Night Wanderer’s Plea by the internationally renowned Mark A. Murphy; and Broken Voices by David Pollard, which sustains his reputation as a major voice in British letters.
Finally, also noteworthy as we set sail for new horizons, are titles published in the ‘interregnum’ between functioning websites, and not until now available in the Shop: Familial by Philip Ruthen (2018), Gratitude on the Coast of Death by David Swann (2017), No Enemy but Time (2017) by Naomi Foyle, and Disappearance without absence / Desapariencia no engaña (2017), by Néstor Ponce, translated by Max Ubelaker Andrade and published with the support of the Programa SUR.
So please come pay us a visit, do some Christmas shopping and from now until Dec 24th use the code WATERLOOP19W in the check out area of the shop for a 10% discount on your order.
All in all, we hope you’ll feel we’re living up to our new hero statement (courtesy of our man in marketing, Gareth Strachan):
WATERLOO PRESS: Bound in Beauty ~ Boundless in Poetry