New Walk Editions, co-edited by NTU Associate Professor, shortlisted for best publisher in national awards

The shortlisting was based on the press's four pamphlets published between autumn 2023 and spring 2024: Never the Right Time by Blake Morrison, The Curiosities by Penny Boxall, Sandbound by Shannon T. Smith, and The Chaos by Derron Sandy. This demonstrates New Walk Editions' passion for pairing new voices with long-established ones, and for a plurality of poetries. The latter two were co-edited with Kelsi Delaney, and are the first results of a new initiative to discover and publish excellent English-language poets who are relatively unknown in the UK from around the world, starting with the Caribbean - though the press has previously published poets from India, Russia, and Israel, as well as many from the UK.

New Walk Editions started life as New Walk Magazine in 2010, publishing poetry, fiction, and artwork, and has since its inception been co-edited by Rory and Nick Everett, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. Authors published in the magazine included John Ashbery, J. M. Coetzee, Sujata Bhatt, Alice Oswald, Andrew Motion, and Sinéad Morrissey. New Walk Editions started life in 2017, and one of the first poets it published was Zayneb Allak, who had recently completed a PhD at NTU and who is now Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. The current shortlisting follows a double shortlisting in 2019, when the press was also shortlisted for Best Publisher, and one of the press's publications, Declan Ryan's Fighters, Losers, was shortlisted for Best Pamphlet. Ryan's debut full-length collection has subsequently been published by Faber and Faber.