Hard Pressed – Mapping Manchester’s Radical Publishing history

Hard Pressed:
'Mapping Manchester’s Radical Publishing history’

Hard Pressed tells an alternative story of fiction and poetry publishing in Manchester, 1975 to 2010. Writers proactively addressing social and regional marginalisation within publishing in a pre-digital, pre-social media age.

All site content is tagged and categorised. You can use the search bar to look for information about the published work by year, author name, keywords referring to subject matter (e.g. home), types of work published (e.g. novels, poetry), writer (e.g. women writers).

We have done our best to contact writers to get permission to reproduce excerpts of their work. If you wish for us to take your work down, please contact us on admin@cultureword.org.uk

Thanks to the Commonword Cultureword team: Amna Bagadi, Peter Kalu, Radhaika Kapur, Ella Otomewo, Mahboobeh Rajabi and Nina Roach; Martin De Mello, Clare Ramsaran, John G Hall, Dipali Das, Sharon Raymond; Manchester Poetry Library, RAPAR, Fatima Khan, Alex Harvard, Fiona Pymont, Kashmir Youth Project, Global Arts CIC, Wythenshawe Library

This project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery Players.

The presses

Although many independent presses and publications of poetry and fiction emerged from Manchester, the ones we have identified here as part of the Hard Pressed project championed writers marginalised by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and neurodiversity, often in more ways than one.

Featured Publications

Here you will find excerpts of some of the work published by the presses we have spotlighted through this heritage project.