Announcement We are now accepting submissions from emerging poets between 21 April and 21 May 2025.

 Full details 

Established in 2017, ignitionpress is an award-winning poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets.

Pamphlets published by the press have so far received six Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections and five pamphlets have also been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award. The press won the Michael Marks Publishers' Award in 2021.You can find out more about the press and how we work in this interview on the Friday Poem website with our former Managing Editor, Les Robinson, or watch this short video that we produced for the Michael Marks Awards, 2021.

Learn more about the 28 pamphlets we have published and their authors on our Pamphlets page. We encourage you to read our pamphlets before submitting to get an idea about the kind of work we tend to publish and how our pamphlets look and feel. Most of our pamphlets are currently on sale, so you can pick up a bargain!

How to submit

We welcome submissions from emerging poets aged 18 and over anywhere in the world. We consider an emerging poet to be a writer who has had some poems published online or in magazines, but who has not yet published a chapbook, pamphlet, or book-length collection. We expect that you will have – or be working towards – a pamphlet-length manuscript of around 18-20 poems. Our pamphlets are normally 36 pages in total. Please see our note below about the editing process at ignitionpress.

Please submit:

• 6 poems that give us a sense of your proposed pamphlet. One or more of these poems can have been previously published. For the purposes of your submission, individual poems should be no more than fifty lines long.
• 75 words that summarise your manuscript as it stands and tells us about you as a poet. Feel free to include any notable poetry projects, successes in competitions, and publications in magazines or anthologies. Please add this to the same document as the poems and ensure that your name and e-mail address are included.

The submission window will be open from Monday 21 April at 00.00 until 23.59 on Wednesday 21 May. Please send your poems and summary as one document to ignitionpress@brookes.ac.uk

Please don’t send your work outside these times as it will not be considered. There is no ‘submissions fee’ to submit your work, and simultaneous submissions are acceptable. However, if your manuscript is accepted by another publisher whilst it is still under consideration by ignitionpress, please inform us asap.

If you have questions about your submission or the process that are not answered by our frequently asked questions section below, please feel free to contact Niall Munro: ignitionpress@brookes.ac.uk

We look forward to reading your work!

Selection and publication

• We will contact successful poets in June 2025. We are aiming to publish two pamphlets during this round.
• Our indicative timeline includes acceptance in June, editing from June-August, publication in September/October, and a launch in October.
• We pay poets £125 upon acceptance of the final manuscript and an additional payment of at least £50 in travel expenses for launches. We also give poets 15 free copies of their pamphlet. Poets can buy subsequent copies of any ignitionpress pamphlet (including their own) at a 40% discount (ie. for £4.20 instead of the RRP of £7).
• Our initial print run for a pamphlet is normally 200 copies.
• ignitionpress guarantees our poets at least one online launch and, depending on where they live, one in-person launch.
• We normally ask that poets do not have another pamphlet or book coming out within a year of their ignitionpress pamphlet being published.
• In tandem with the poet, the press promotes the pamphlets extensively via social media, through the Poetry Centre’s marketing channels, at events, and on our website.
• We sell the pamphlets via the Oxford Brookes Shop, distribute them to various bookshops and festivals around the UK, and enter them for competitions such as the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice and the Michael Marks Awards.
• ignitionpress aims to actively support our poets beyond publication, and many of our writers have taken part in events, workshops, and other opportunities organized by the Poetry Centre or the press.

Our new guest editor

We are delighted to announce that Isabelle Baafi is joining the ignitionpress team as a Guest Editor for this round of pamphlet selections! The press published Isabelle's pamphlet in 2020 and since then she has developed an impressive reputation as poet and editor. We are very excited that the press will be benefiting from her editorial expertise!

Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which is a Poetry Book Society (PBS) Recommendation, and Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an Obsidian Foundation Fellow. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

In this round we will be looking to publish two pamphlets. Isabelle will edit one and Niall Munro, the director of the press, will edit the other.