Carcanet Press operates from the second floor of an office building on Cross Street in central Manchester, three minutes' walk from St Ann's Square. The press was founded in 1969 by the editor and poet Michael Schmidt, who ran it without interruption for fifty-four years before stepping back from the editorship in late 2023.
The succession has been the subject of some attention in the British poetry press. Schmidt, who remains as the press's emeritus director, has handed editorial control to a three-person team: the senior editor Anastasia Hyde, the production editor Rory Pelham, and the poetry editor Mahsa Tahmoures.
This piece is not about the succession. It is about the list. Carcanet has, by its own count, published approximately nine hundred titles since 1969, of which around six hundred remain in print or available through print-on-demand.
The press's central editorial commitments have not changed in five and a half decades. It publishes contemporary British, Irish, and Commonwealth poetry; it publishes English-language translation of European, Latin American, and occasionally Asian poetry; and it maintains a substantial backlist of twentieth-century poets whose reputations it has either established or sustained.
The list's identity, observed in aggregate, is recognisable. Carcanet has been the British home of, among many others, Eavan Boland, Sinéad Morrissey, Sujata Bhatt, Robert Pinsky, Les Murray, and the late Frederick Seidel. Schmidt's editorial taste, Tahmoures said in a recent conversation, was for the poem that earns its own difficulty.
"The work he liked," Tahmoures said, "was work that asked the reader to come some distance toward it. It did not meet the reader at the door."
This is one description of Carcanet's house style, although Schmidt himself would, by all accounts, dispute the suggestion that the press has a house style at all. Hyde, the senior editor, agrees that the list's coherence has come from the editor's eye rather than from any deliberate programme.
"Michael never said yes to a poet because the poet would fit the list," Hyde said. "He said yes because the work was good. The list emerged from that decision repeated several hundred times."
The succession question, then, is whether the new editorial team can sustain that pattern without Schmidt's specific eye. The answer is not yet visible. The press has announced its 2026 list, which contains twenty-two titles, of which fourteen are by poets Carcanet has previously published and eight are by poets new to the list.
That ratio is within the range Carcanet has maintained for two decades. New voices typically account for between thirty and forty per cent of each year's list, with the remainder being further volumes by existing authors and occasional reissues from the deep backlist.
The 2026 list also includes three translations: a Czech selected, a contemporary Portuguese collection, and a new translation of a mid-century French poet whose work has not previously appeared in Carcanet editions.
The Czech and Portuguese titles are the work of translators Carcanet has commissioned before. The French translation is by a new translator to the press, the Dublin-based Aoife Caron, whose previous work appeared with a smaller Irish imprint.
This last commission, Tahmoures said, was the first acquisition she had made entirely on her own editorial authority. She was, she said, slightly nervous about it. The press accepted the manuscript on the strength of a thirty-page sample, which Tahmoures read three times before recommending it.
The press's economics are, by small-press standards, healthier than the average British poetry imprint of comparable size. Carcanet receives consistent funding from Arts Council England, has a strong relationship with the Manchester Metropolitan University Writing School, and has built, across five decades, a substantial backlist that generates predictable recurring revenue.
Pelham, the production editor, declined to discuss specific financial figures but said that the press's 2025 trading position had been "comfortable but not luxurious," which is, in the British small-press lexicon, a phrase that means the rent has been paid and the staff have been paid and there is no margin for an unexpectedly bad year.
The press's distribution runs through a Glasgow warehouse that handles a number of other UK literary publishers. The returns rate, Pelham said, runs at about eleven per cent across the list, which is low for poetry and reflects the press's careful approach to print-run setting.
Print runs at Carcanet are calibrated by title. A new collection by an established poet may run to fifteen hundred copies. A debut, or a translation, may run to six or seven hundred. The press uses print-on-demand for backlist titles that have fallen below a sales threshold of approximately a hundred copies a year.
This hybrid model, more conservative than the all-offset approach of the press's first three decades, has allowed Carcanet to keep more of its backlist nominally in print than would otherwise be economically possible. Hyde estimates that print-on-demand now accounts for between four and six per cent of annual revenue.
The succession at Carcanet is being watched, in part, because Schmidt's departure marks the first generational change in any of the half-dozen British poetry presses founded in the 1960s and 1970s. The next decade will produce similar transitions at Bloodaxe, at Anvil's successor imprints, and at the smaller regional presses founded in the same period.
None of these transitions will be smooth, exactly. The poetry-publishing economy that supported the founding generation has shifted under their successors. Print runs are smaller. Sales are slower. The reader base, while loyal, is older than it was thirty years ago.
What sustains a press like Carcanet through such a transition is the backlist and the institutional relationships. Both are, by definition, the work of the previous generation, and both are, for the moment, intact.
Tahmoures, asked what she expected the list to look like in 2030, was cautious. "I expect it will look like the Carcanet list," she said. "I think that is the most we can promise."