OLH collaboration with award-winning poetry publisher
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 18 September 2025
We’re thrilled to announce that the OLH is partnering with award-winning poetry publisher the87press to relaunch its flagship poetry journal The Hythe Review.
Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led literary arts organisation based in South London. The press publishes digital and print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays that prioritise anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism. The87press has built a strong reputation as a publisher of the highest quality, connecting readerships in the Global South with diaspora communities in the Global North, whilst also prioritising the development and representation of working-class, neurodivergent, and LGBTQ+ writers.
The Hythe was set up in 2019 to provide an open space for poetic experiments and an accessible community resource. Publishing new writing monthly since 2020, it became a lively platform for new poetry, critical reviews and author interviews.
The journal will relaunch as The Hythe Review with the OLH in 2026. Scholars have praised the journal as “one of the freshest and most innovative poetry and poetry criticism journals to launch in years,” a publication that responds to “a clear gap in the publication of poets of colour in the UK.” As one reviewer writes: “I teach contemporary poetics and creative writing, and I hold the previous publications of the journal as among the finest in contemporary Anglophone poetics research.”
OLH Executive Director Professor Caroline Edwards said of the move: “I’m really excited to be working with Azad Ashim Sharma, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Sopo Ramischwili, Aisheshek Magauina, and the incumbent editorial fellows: Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Abeera Khan, and Alycia Pirmohamed. The Hythe has already distinguished itself as vital publication supported by a strong community in South London, as well as abroad. Relaunching with the OLH as The Hythe Review will allow this important poetry journal to reach a global audience.
"Using our library funding to flip the journal to diamond open access will unlock new poetry and poetry criticism for writers and readers without access to institutional funds. Working together, the OLH and the87press can begin the difficult task of tackling entrenched inequalities in the under-representation of marginalised writers in publishing.”
The87press Founding Director Azad Ashim Sharma said: “The87press has always tried to find innovative ways of meaningfully contributing to systems change within the publishing sector more broadly. The new partnership with OLH will transform our online publishing endeavours into an unique journal, building on our Founding Editor, Kashif Sharma-Patel’s vision of an open-access regular publication that attended to grassroots poetry and poetics.
"We are thrilled to shepherd the evolution of that platform into a publication that will provide a crucial avenue for critical reviews of independently published poetry collections alongside cultural essays at a time when corporate publishing dominates the conversation we are able to have about literature through the majority of current outlets.
The Hythe Review will build laterally, fostering a space for critical dialogue which will improve the reception and accessibility of poetry in the UK whilst also shining the light on non-fiction publications that mobilise critical insights gleaned from our global and local contexts. We will maintain these ambitions with our international outlook, creating a much needed platform open to all marginalised peoples during a time of increased discrimination and exclusion.”
Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Poetry and Reviews Editor said: "I’m excited to be part of The Hythe Review, an open-access journal that hopes to shape not just what we read but also how and why - with an ethic of care, critical rigour, and collectivity at its heart. I deeply look forward to supporting and being shaped by the many brilliant writers whose work will find a home here."
Dr. Abeera Khan (SOAS), Non-Fiction Editor said: "I'm delighted to work with The Hythe Review to publish critical and creative radical writing that speaks with and through the current conjuncture."
The Hythe Review is one of several journals moving to the OLH in 2025, including the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Energy Humanities, and others still under embargo. Thanks to the support of our international network of library members, the OLH has been able to undertake the complex, skilled technical work of migrating these journals and committing to fund the cost of their publication in perpetuity.
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 35+ journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors.
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