Macha Press is a cross-border publishing initiative established in 2024 with the aim of addressing the underrepresented status of experimental and marginalised poetries in Ireland’s literary ecology – the island’s need for a publisher that is significantly ambitious to showcase innovation and expand parameters of the lyric tradition. Founded by seven poets (we have since added an eighth to our number) whose areas of practice and acumen span editing, literary publishing, author development, literary criticism, events curation and bookselling, our editorial team is comprised of Siobhán Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kelly, Alanna Offield, Lorna Shaughnessy, Kathleen McCracken and Milena Williamson. Together we are a diverse collective that includes members of various communities, national identities, ethnicities, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations and intermingles established with new editorial talent. We publish two books per year and seek to alternate between the work of established and emerging writers, with occasional works deserving of recovery.
The name of the press is pronounced “MAKH-uh” and it references the eponymous and pregnant goddess who runs through the Ulster Cycle. Macha appears in various incarnations and is usually associated with tropes of fertility and power. In Gaelic the word macha also means geographic plain, an open space for boundless possibilities. And there's a hint of the Scottish word makar, which translates as poet, maker.
At Macha, our twin organisational aims are to publish poetry by marginalised voices, including work that is innovative, experimental, formally hybrid and interdisciplinary, or requires historical recovery, and to promote the dissemination and visibility of underrepresented and innovative and experimental poetries to a wider audience local to Belfast, as well as on an all-island basis. We support poets with launch and satellite events – and also by way of our Editorial Services, which brings the editorial and creative acumen of our editors to the broader literary ecology. We also radically partner with an array of cultural and educational institutions and organisations.
At Macha, we place significant focus on the design of the book – as object, artifact – a volume of space that presents as compositional canvas, with each page celebrating the fact of paper and the visual comportment of its printed text. The books have a square shape, allowing for greater play, more formal and structural innovation, than the conventional rectangular area and A-5-ish footprint afforded by the shape of the traditional collection. These design principles extend beyond our 210 x 210 format to include a range of concern around accessibility and legibility, including monochromatic palettes and attention to typeface, font. Filosofia, designed by Zuzana Licko, has been carefully chosen for its humanistic, eye-friendly serif (at generous size, standard for inners, 13 point) and contributes to an aesthetic experience that emphasises readability. Each book is printed at Northern Irish firm W & G Baird and inmixes thoughtfully-managed production detail (thread-sewn binding, French flaps and sustainable offset printing) as part of a hand-numbered, five-hundred run collectable series.
In all of this, we've had the good fortune to collaborate with artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer, who designed our colophon, a paper-cut of two back-to-back horse’s heads (horses are one of the goddess Macha’s attributes) as well as devising a hand-mixed palette for our website and developing other foundational visual matter. Integral to our ongoing activity is the collaboration with our designer Julian Manev, an award-winning architect who brings significant skill and vision to each book, and also a collaboration with photographer Jos McGookin, whose flair shapes our developing visual archive.
Our first book by Belfast poet Eilish Martin is entitled ! All’arme / ? And what … if not. It is a tête-bêche, a head-to-toe book that reverses so there are two books in one. The book consists of two long poem sequences, and in the centre of the book there is a reproduction of Eilish’s visual art alphabet sequence originally rendered in Letraset. This book was launched in Ulster University's Art Gallery in October 2024. In aid of the dissemination of Martin’s work, we celebrated its publication of not only with a launch, but also co-curated an exhibition of her book objects and verbal-visual matter with the Belfast School of Art. We have since facilitated Martin’s work being featured in a range of journals, festivals, academic institutions and satellite events.
Our second publication Crowd Work, by Dublin writer Sam Furlong was celebrated at sold-out launch events this May at Ulster University’s Art Gallery and at a companion event featuring Furlong and Martin supported by Poetry Ireland at the Irish Writers Centre (Dublin). Like Martin’s publication, it has garnered significant critical attention and has been featured at a broad range of public events. Our third and most recent publication, morsels by Belfast / Derry poet Susanna Galbraith, was launched October of this year in both Belfast and Dublin to notable acclaim. We are very much looking forward to the production of our 2026 titles by lauded poets Máighréad Medbh and Susan Connolly – which are currently in development – and to all of the dynamic titles planned on our list.
By way of collective networks of contact and affiliation, we hope to continue to harness not only practice excellence but also cross-sector collaboration and novel audiences. Our activities can be tracked on social media (@macha.press / @machapress.bsky.social) and our dedicated website (https://www.machapress.com/ ) which facilitates sales, our events calendar and a regular newsletter. There is also a funding structure available here so that readers can become subscribers to and supporters of our activity should they so choose.
Happily, a range of excellent independent
booksellers retail the publications – they include: Belfast School of Art Shop,
Books, Paper Scissors, No Alibis, and Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich (Belfast)
with Seaside Books (pop-up / Northern Ireland), Little Acorns Books (Derry) and
Cailleach (pop-up / Drogheda) and Books Upstairs, The Library Project, The
Winding Stair and Gutter Books (Dublin) and Charlie Byrnes and Kenny’s (Galway).
Macha Press is supported by both the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and also by Belfast City Council.
Kathleen McCracken [photo credit: Jos McGookin] is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2016 a bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, was published by the Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina. A collaboration with filmmaker/photographer John T. Davis premiered at The Art Gallery at Ulster University in 2024. From 1992-2022 Kathleen was Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University.
Natasha Cuddington [photo credit: Jos McGookin] is a poet and critic. Her translations, essays and reviews have appeared variously. An assistant editor at Cyphers, she co-curated Of Mouth and was a Belfast Book Festival Associate in 2022 and 2023. She leads workshops at Crescent Arts Centre, Open Arts and collaborates with disability arts charities. With Ruth Carr, she co-edited Ann Zell’s posthumous Donegal is a red door and Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her debut Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published in 2018.