Linen Press is a small, independent publisher run by women, for women. We are now the only indie women’s press in the UK.

Our policy is to encourage and promote women writers and to give voice to a wide range of perspectives and themes that are relevant to women. We display and rejoice in the differences in female creative voices.

We publish books that are diverse, challenging, and surprising. The collective background of our writers is a multi-coloured patchwork of cultures, countries, ages and writing styles.

Established 2005  •  Finalist 2015 Women In Publishing Pandora award  •  Shortlisted 2019 Most Innovative Publisher Saboteur Awards.

 


Newest Releases

The Dolphin

In 1937 Larry Lambert has a vision of a magnificent pub built on frozen fields ‘like a grassy sea’. It is an echo of a single, failed, gay encounter in a fishing boat, and in its construction he invests his energy and his thwarted dreams. He calls it The Dolphin. And so unfolds a moving exploration of the constraining expectations of society on three generations of one family. For Larry, there is the cruel impossibility of being gay in 1930s Britain and his ensuing loveless marriage with the embittered Rosemary. For his daughter, Joanie, there is the crushing weight of duty and respectability during the post-war years. Only granddaughter Lottie pulls free and finds the freedom her grandfather and mother were denied.

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My Blue Peninsula

My Blue Peninsula is Maureen Freely’s fourth novel set in Istanbul, the city of her childhood. In each, a character from the sidelines of the preceding novel takes centre stage to probe a mystery left pending. We first met Dora Giraud in Sailing Through Byzantium as the observant daughter of a famously bohemian household who could not, then, speak the truth.

My Blue Peninsula is a confession that fills seven notebooks written by Dora decades later. In them, she tries to explain to her adult daughters why she remains in Istanbul after escaping death at the hands of extremists, and why she risks her life to campaign for the truth about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides, ferociously denied for a century by the Turkish state.

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Tabula Rasa
Tabula rasa gathers poems by a diverse range of women in an anthology that celebrates womanhood while calling out its challenges, constraints and sorrows. The exquisite poems here explore new beginnings and wide vistas, speaking across boundaries to women everywhere. Women’s lives and dreams – past, present and future – are honoured on these pages. Startling new voices, and emerging poets such as Alexandra Fossinger, Mary-Jane Holmes and Kathleen Jones appear alongside established and award-winning writers including Anna Barker, Elizabeth Barrett, Clare Best, Mona Dash, Charlotte Gann, Maria Jastrzębska, Avril Joy, Jess Richards, Gerry Stewart. read more →