Hazel Press newsletter: Winter 2025
Titles scheduled for publication in 2025, the latest on the Hazel blog
As light creeps back and hazel catkins begin to shake and lengthen, we’d like to share the titles we are preparing for publication this year. As always, they will be printed on 100% recycled paper with non-GM vegetable inks.
First to emerge this spring will be Pear Trees, a short story by Laura Beatty about death – and life.
After a stranger calls at Evi’s house, she becomes convinced she has been visited by Death. But what is really happening?
Poetic, moving and often funny, Laura’s wry short story is set in an imagined mountain village in Albania. It blends folklore and ecology to ask the biggest of questions about our relationship with the living world.
Laura is the author of two biographies, two novels and two genre-defying books (a mix of travel, history, memoir and fiction). Her first novel, Pollard won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award as well as being shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize for books which evoke the spirit of place. Her most recent book, Looking for Theophrastus, was shortlisted for the Runciman prize. Laura lives in Bath and on the Greek island of Syros.
Bee
In May, Bee takes wing, a colony of poems about honeybees by Rachel Bower. Rachel is a poet and novelist based in Sheffield. She was awarded second place in the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2024, and her poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The White Review, Magma, The Rialto and The London Magazine. Her first novel It Comes from the River is published by Bloomsbury on 30th January.
Teasels
Things get spikier in the summer with Sam Francis’ eco-feminist almanac Teasels. Sam is an artist and amateur naturalist who seeks to work in dialogue with non-human life forms. Her work explores themes of aloneness and the female body, often set within the landscape. In the summer of 2023 she kept a diary of teasels growing in her garden.
Remedies
When the nights lengthen again in October, we’ll be offering Julia Blackburn’s collection of remedies and charms against a range of afflictions ancient and modern.
Julia writes: ‘The 6th-century physician Alexander of Tralles said that his patients – like besieged cities – must be defended by anything that gave them the courage to go on living. He found that images, amulets and all sorts of strange remedies seemed to help, even though there was no rational reason for this to be so.’
Julia has written 12 books of non-fiction, two novels and a memoir. Her work has been awarded several prizes and translated into a number of languages. In 2022, Hazel Press published The Wren, her short, poetic collection of journal snippets.
New on the blog - Flowers for Ophelia
Three poems by Michelle Szobody in the voice of Ophelia, exploring how her relationships with both nature and patriarchy affect her sense of self. Each jumps off from one of the many botanical references in Hamlet.
The poems are accompanied by two images by Michelle’s collaborator, Philippe Nash, who responds to the poems with etchings incorporating specimens of plants he collected in Sussex and Gloucestershire.