​Hercules Editions was founded by poet Tamar Yoseloff and designer and art editor Vici MacDonald in 2012, with the aim of bringing together new poems with visual imagery. Their first publication, Formerly (featuring Tamar’s sonnets in response to Vici’s photographs of liminal London spaces) was hailed by Owen Hatherley as “a direct and quietly urgent dispatch from a familiar but disappearing London”. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

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Since then Hercules Editions has produced Heart Archives by Sue Rose, Ormonde by Hannah Lowe (selected by Colin Grant as one of five essential books on the Windrush generation – see here), Silents by Claire Crowther, Hammersmith by Sean O’Brien, Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars by Ruth Valentine, A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller by Jacqueline Saphra, The Singing Glacier by Helen Mort, The Practical Visionary by Chris McCabe and Sophie Herxheimer, and The Gospel of Trickster by Nancy Charley, and Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix. In spring 2020, Jacqueline Saphra’s second book with Hercules Editions, Veritas: Poems after Artemisia, was published, and in July 2020 our new series of essays by poets, Hercules Papers, was inaugurated with The Wandering Mountains by poet and critic David Wheatley and continued by Access All Areas by Jacqueline Saphra in 2021. The Nine Mothers of Heimdallr by Miriam Nash, was published in October 2020 and 2021 saw the publication of Utøya Thereafter by Harry Man and Endre Ruset.

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In the past couple of years, Hercules has brought out, to great acclaim, The Dereliction by Liz Berry and Tom Hicks; two related books by Hannah Lowe – Rock, Bird, Butterfly and Old Friends; and new poems by Tim Dooley, with his Notes on The Waste Land, and Sean O'Brien's Impasse, his homage to Jules Maigret.

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And for Spring 2024, we are bringing out Gregory Woods' They Exchange Glances, his translations of gay Modernist poems. Visit here for more information about our crowdsourcing campaign for this book.

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