Liverpool University Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Liverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third oldest university press in England, behind only Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. It now publishes more than 160 books a year alongside 50 academic journals, working across modern languages, literatures, history, and visual culture.

  A press with that reach has been tied to a single university for over a century. What has kept it running, and who has been behind it?

  Its catalogue reaches readers well past Liverpool. In North America, its books are distributed by Longleaf.

• 2. Heads And Scholars

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  Lascelles Abercrombie held one of LUP's earliest leadership posts, having also served as the University of Liverpool's first poetry lecturer.

  Ronald Ross, a Nobel Prize winner, published his work with the press, alongside the literary critic Hermione Lee.

  In 2004, the press changed status, moving from a University of Liverpool department into a subsidiary structure.

  In 2024, Chief Executive Anthony Cond became the first President of the Association of University Presses from outside the Americas.

• 3. Verses Under Pavilion

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  Mona Arshi was the inaugural poet of the press's Pavilion Poetry imprint. Her debut collection, Small Hands, won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at the 2015 Forward Prizes for Poetry.

  Bhanu Kapil's How to Wash a Heart followed with the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize, another major award for the same list.

  The press's reach extends well beyond poetry, into publishing work carried out for outside institutions.

• 4. Opening The Books

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  The British Academy, Historic England and the Voltaire Foundation all rely on Liverpool University Press to produce their publications, alongside its own imprint.

  Liverpool University Press was the first publisher to sign up to Knowledge Unlatched, a global library consortium approach to funding open access books.

  In 2014, the press launched Modern Languages Open, a peer-reviewed open access platform publishing research from across the modern languages.

  That same commitment to open access extends into the press's list of academic journals, each built up over decades within a particular discipline.

• 5. Pages Across Decades

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  Bulletin of Hispanic Studies has been published since 1923, one of the longer-running titles in the Liverpool University Press journals list.

  Town Planning Review, often shortened to TPR, dates back to 1910. Extrapolation and French Studies are also part of the journals list.

  The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies was established in 2006. It launched the following year at the Inaugural Conference of the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network, held at Liverpool John Moores University.

  It moved to Liverpool University Press in 2009. Its coverage focuses on how disability appears in literature and culture, informed by disability theory and lived experience of disability.

  Today, that overlap between literary study and disability theory continues under the editorship of David Bolt at Liverpool Hope University.