About

The editorial board and staff

Tony Ward is Managing Editor / Editorial Director of Arc Publications. He founded the Press in 1969, and set about introducing new work to an eager readership, initially through a series of hand-produced pamphlets and later through full collections (see The History of the Press). Over thirty-five years on, Tony Ward runs the press, now a limited liability company, with fellow director Angela Jarman and an Editorial Board of three from a converted textile mill on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border in the North of England, producing upwards of 25 new titles a year. He still adheres to his founding principles: to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary literature. Never willing to compromise, nor afraid to take risks, he continues to be the inspiration and source of energy behind the enterprise that he established.

Angela Jarman (Director of Development) joined Arc Publications in 1994 having previously run her own academic microform publishing business, Altair Publishing, for ten years. Originally from a musical background, she was the moving force behind the establishment of the Arc Music imprint in 1998. She works alongside Tony Ward in the day-to-day running of the press, her particular areas of responsibility being pre-press and marketing.

Jo Shapcott joined Arc Publications in 2002 as its UK Editor with responsibility for looking after the British and Irish poetry lists.

She was born in London in 1958, studied at Trinity College Dublin, St. Hilda's College Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Bristol. She taught English at Rolle College, Exmouth, before working at the Arts Council and South Bank Centre in London as an arts administrator. Until summer 2002 she was Visiting Professor at the Department of English Literary and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, based at Oxford Brookes University. She was the 1997 Penguin Writers Fellow at the British Library. Jo Shapcott has won many prestigious prizes and awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection with Electroplating the Baby (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) with My Life Asleep (1998) and the National Poetry Competition - twice.

She has worked with a number of musicians on collaborative projects and has written lyrics for, or had poems set to music by, composers such as Detlev Glamert, Nigel Osborne, Alec Roth, Erollyn Wallen, Peter Wiegold and John Woolrich. Her poems were set to music by composer Stephen Montague in The Creatures Indoors, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in London in 1997. During the BBC Proms season, she presents the weekly 'Poetry Proms' on Radio 3. The following titles by Jo Shapcott have been published:

Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe, 1988); Phrase Book (Oxford University Press, 1992) A Journey to the Inner Eye: A Guide for All (South Bank Centre, 1996); Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times editor with Matthew Sweeney (Faber and Faber, 1996); Motherland (Gwaithel and Gilwern, 1996); Penguin Modern Poets 12 Helen Dunmore, Jo Shapcott, Matthew Sweeney (Penguin, 1997); My Life Asleep (Oxford University Press, 1998); Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century editor with Don Paterson (Picador, 1999); Poetry Quartets No. 5 audio cassette including work by Helen Dunmore, U. A. Fanthorpe, Elizabeth Jennings, Jo Shapcott (Bloodaxe, 1999); Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (Faber and Faber, 2000); Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery editor with Linda Anderson (Newcastle / Bloodaxe Poetry Series: 1, 2002); Tender Taxes (Faber and Faber, 2002); The Transformers Bloodaxe, 2002.

John Kinsella has been the International Editor for Arc Publications since 1998 and has been responsible for bringing many fine poets from the Commonwealth and North America, largely unknown outside their native countries, to a wider international readership through publication by Arc in the UK. As International Editor, he works tirelessly to represent Arc's interests in the international publishing scene.

John Kinsella was born in Perth in 1963, studied at the University of Western Australia and travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards, including a Young Australian Creative Fellowship and a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council.

He is the founding editor of the international literary journal Salt, a consultant to Westerly (CASL, University of Western Australia) and International Editor of the American journal The Kenyon Review. His fiction includes a novel, Genre, and a collection of short stories, Grappling Eros, but he is best known as a poet, with ten full-length collections published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Australia.

In 1998, he took up residence in the UK, where he is Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He is also Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia and Professor of English at Kenyon College in the United States.

As well as being Arc's International Editor he has had three collections published by Arc, the first of which - The Undertow: New and Selected Poems (Arc, 1996) - was his first UK edition. After his second collection for Arc, The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1997) he edited Landbridge: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, published by Arc in conjunction with Fremantle Arts Centre Press. His third collection, the highly-acclaimed Lightning Tree (originally published in Australia by FACP in 1996) appeared in 2003, and his latest book from Arc, the sequence America was published in January 2006.

Jean Boase-Beier has been working closely with Arc Publications since 1995, when Arc published her translation (with Anthony Vivis) of Rose Ausländer's Mother Tongue. As a result of this publication, the parallel-text translation series 'Visible Poets' was conceived, with Jean Boase-Beier as series editor. The first three titles in the series were published in 2000, and with over 20 titles now available (all by poets introduced to Arc by Jean Boase-Beier), Arc has established itself as one of the leading publishers of poetry in translation, bringing to an English-language readership some of the most significant poets writing today.

Jean Boase-Beier is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Literature at the University of East Anglia, where she runs the MA in Literary Translation. She has translated poetry by Volker von Törne, Rose Ausländer and Ernst Meister and has written extensively on translation, especially the translation of poetry. Her most recent books are (ed., with Michael Holman) The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity, (St Jerome Publishing, 1999), The German Language (with Ken Lodge), published by Blackwell in 2003, Between Nothing and Nothing, a translation of Ernst Meister's poems, published by Arc in 2003 and Stylistic Approaches to Translation, published in 2006 by St Jerome.

About the staff...

Working alongside Tony Ward are Angela Jarman are Sue Flynn and Charlie Johnston (female!), one of whose duties is to process the unsolicited manuscripts sent to Arc (see Arc's policy on unsolicited manuscripts).

About Arc Publications | Its history | About the editorial board and staff

• Home
• Catalogue
• Writers
• Readings
• About Arc
• News
• Contact