Parthian Books


Parthian Books is an independent publisher based in Cardigan, Wales. It was founded in 1993 by Lewis Davies and Gillian Griffiths. An editorially-led publishing house, Parthian publishes a range of contemporary fiction, poetry, non-fiction and drama, as well as art books. It is also involved in the European literary scene. Parthian's motto is "A Carnival of Voices in Independent Publishing".
Some of the authors that Parthian Books has published include Alys Conran, Rebecca F John, Tristan Hughes, Deborah Kay Davies, Professor Dai Smith, Rachel Trezise, Susmita Bhattacharya, Lewis Davies, Glen Peters and Jeni Williams. Parthian also publishes celebrity autobiographies, such as Griff Rhys Jones' Insufficiently Welsh, and Boyd Clack's Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.
Parthian receive financial support from the Welsh Books Council in the form of grants, they are also responsible for publishing the Library of Wales series, which is a Welsh Assembly Government and Welsh Books Council joint initiative.

Translation

Parthian Books works in partnership with Il Caduceo literary agency in Genoa who represents their writers in translation. Parthian has developed translation links throughout Europe and beyond, and its books have appeared in fifteen foreign language editions including French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Danish, Portuguese and Russian. Parthian has also recently announced its first book deal with New Star publications in China for the thriller The Colour of a Dog Running Away by Richard Gwyn.
Parthian also publishes titles translated into English, such as To Bury the Dead, Under the Dust, The Bridge Over the River, Strange Language, Martha, Jac and Shanco from Basque, Catalan, German, Spanish and Welsh. In 2015, the publisher launched the Europa Carnivale series, with the intention of releasing translations of works originally published in German, Polish, Slovak, Spanish and Turkish.
In 2016, Parthian was awarded money by the India Wales Fund for a collaborative literature project called The Valley, The City, The Village. The project will see the publication in 2018 of a writing anthology curated by three Welsh writers and three Indian writers. In early 2017, the three Welsh writers visited India to engage with the culture and take part in writing and reading events. In spring 2017, the three Indian authors will visit Wales. The project is being run in collaboration with Bee Books, an English publisher in Kolkata, India. The writers will blog about their experiences, and make use of them for the anthology.

Awards

Since its foundation in 1993, Parthian and its titles have regularly received recognition through award nominations. Welsh Boys Too, a collection of short stories by John Sam Jones, was named as a 'Stonewall Honor Book in Literature' in 2002, and in 2003 Lewis Davies' Work, Sex and Rugby picked up the World Book Day Award for Wales. The Long Dry, the debut novel from Cynan Jones, won the Betty Trask Award in 2007.
In 2006, Parthian author Rachel Trezise became the first recipient of the Dylan Thomas Prize for her short story collection Fresh Apples. Following this success in the inaugural award, two further Parthian titles have been nominated for the £30,000 prize: Jemma L. King's poetry collection The Shape of a Forest in 2013 and Alys Conran's novel Pigeon in 2017.
Parthian has also enjoyed success in the Wales Book of the Year, an award given annually to the best Welsh and English language works by Welsh or Welsh interest authors. Deborah Kay Davies gave the publisher its first win in 2009 with her short story collection Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful. Further wins followed in 2011 and in 2017. Parthian's record of three Wales Book of the Year awards is matched by Faber, and only bettered by Seren.
Many award-winning individual short stories and poems have later been included in Parthian collections. Most notably, these include 'Mr. Roopratna's Chocolate' from Lewis Davies' Love and Other Possibilities, which won the Rhys Davies Prize in 1999, and 'Moon Dog' from Rebecca F John's Clown's Shoes, which won the PEN International New Voices Award in 2015. Since 2012, Parthian has published Cheval: the annual Terry Hetherington Award anthology. Many of the winners of this award, including Mari Ellis Dunning, Natalie Ann Holborow, Jemma L. King and Joâo Morais, have later released their debut publications with Parthian.

Imprints and series

Bright Young Things

In 2010, Parthian launched the Bright Young Things series, with the intention of helping young writers into print. The first four writers published were Tyler Keevil, Will Gritten, J. P. Smythe and Susie Wild. A poetry anthology, 10 of the Best, followed in 2011, featuring ten poems each from Mab Jones, Alan Kellermann, Anna Lewis, M. A. Oliver-Semenov and Siôn Tomos Owen. Full poetry collections from Kellermann and Lewis were published under the Bright Young Things banner in 2012, though the series marketing was less prominent. Collections from Oliver-Semenov and Owen were published by Parthian in 2016, but by this point the Bright Young Things series had been seemingly abandoned.

Europa Carnivale

The Europa Carnivale series is a collection of fiction and poetry from contemporary European women writers. The series began with a translation of Goldfish Memory by Swiss writer Monique Schwitter in 2015. Other writers in the series include Alys Conran, Emilia Ivancu, Rebecca F. John, Uršuľa Kovalyk and Ece Temelkuran. The titles released in the series so far have picked up a number of prestigious awards, among them the PEN International New Voices Award and the Wales Book of the Year.

Library of Wales

The Library of Wales series is a project intending to revive and preserve classic Welsh titles. Titles published so far are:
To coincide with the Baltic market focus at the 2018 London Book Fair, Parthian launched the Parthian Baltic series. The series includes translations of works by writers from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, among them Alberts Bels, Eeva Park and Krišjānis Zeļģis.