Peepal Tree Press, based in England, publishes Caribbean, Black British and South Asian fiction, poetry and academic books.
Peepal Tree is a wholly independent company, founded in 1985, and now publishes around 30-40 books a year. Peepal Tree Press has published over 250 titles, and states a commitment to keeping them in print on their website. The list features new writers and established voices. In 2009 the press launched the Caribbean Modern Classics Series, which restores to print important books from the 1950s and '60s. Peepal Tree Press is part-funded by Arts Council England and was included in their 2011 National Portfolio.
Peepal Tree Press is recognised also for Inscribe and Young Inscribe, a writer development project which supports emerging writers of African & Asian descent in the Yorkshire region, which has included writers such as Khadijah Ibrahiim, Seni Seneviratne and Rommi Smith, who has been Writer-in-Residence for the Houses of Parliament, the BBC during the Commonwealth Games, BBC Music Live, the British Council at California State University in Los Angeles, and Keats House.
Peepal Tree Press's focus is "on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world", though it is also concerned with Black British writing.
The press is based in Leeds in Yorkshire, part of the growing, independent publishing sector outside London. The head office is based at 17 King’s Avenue, in Burley, a rundown, multicultural part of Leeds.
Peepal Tree Press has published, in various forms, such writers as Emmy Award-winner Kwame Dawes, his father Neville Dawes, Aldeburgh Poetry Prize-winner and Forward Poetry Prize-nominee Christian Campbell, Christine Craig, Opal Palmer Adisa, Ishion Hutchinson, Dorothea Smartt, Alecia McKenzie, Courttia Newland, Jackie Kay and Kamau Brathwaite.
Famous quotes containing the words tree and/or press:
“A tree that can fill the span of a man’s arms
Grows from a downy tip;
A terrace nine stories high
Rises from hodfuls of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles
Starts from beneath one’s feet.”
—Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.)
“It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.”
—Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)