New Independent Publisher for People of Color

 This came to me through the Literary Hub newsletter: Hajar Press: The Indie Publisher With Anti-Racism At Its Core.

Hajar Press is an independent political publishing house run by and for people of colour, with new books either recently published or soon to come from Sarah Lasoye, Jamal Mehmood, Heba Hayek, Yara Hawari, Cradle Community & Lola Olufemi. Tope Olufemi talks to founders, Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin

Hajar Press is the new house setting an exciting precedent for the future of print publishing. The press aims to platform writers of colour, creating space within publishing for these writers where there’s little. Founded by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, Hajar Press responds to the widespread commercialisation of diversity, by giving its writers room to produce transformative and urgent writing, fearlessly unpicking and critiquing systematic inequality, and encouraging readers to imagine a world beyond.

“We are political, in that we don’t take a ‘neutral’ stance on issues like Palestine, abolition, capitalism, etc.” co-founders Brekhna and Farhaana tell me. “We ask our writers, ‘What would you want to write if you could write anything you wanted?’” This boundary-less, free approach to writing means that Hajar Press has a line-up of some of the timeliest, fluid writing that the UK has to offer being published by them this year.

The Quietus article linked to above also has an interview with one of the co-founders describing in detail what the publisher will be putting out this year and the philosophy of the publisher.