Since 1944, we’ve been Cork’s answer to the question: what stories matter? Founded to push back against censorship and give voice to what official Ireland preferred left unsaid, we’re still in the business of publishing books that refuse to be polite about the truth.
What we publish
We’re drawn to books that complicate the record. Literary speculative thrillers that won’t stay in their lane. Investigative histories that unsettle settled narratives. Translated European fiction that brings new textures to Irish literature. Crime novels set in real Irish cities. Children’s Non-Fiction and books steeped in Irish mythology that don’t patronise young readers or perpetuate unhelpful stereotypes. Irish-language work and bilingual texts that treat the language as living, and translations of classic texts Irish language texts that are still relevant today. We publish Theo Dorgan, Mary O’Donnell and Eddie Lenihan.
We publish debut novelists Carina McNally, Cormac Quinn, Rebecca Murphy and the internationally acclaimed German writer. Judith Hermann. We are publishing new work from a debut Palestinian author, translated from Arabic into English (more to come on this.) We publish books about the Civil War internment camps by James Durney and books about Palestinian football teams visiting Ireland. We’re interested in what you’re obsessed with, provided you can make use care too.
What we’re not looking for
Diaries masquerading as memoirs. We need narrative shape, not a reproduction of your journal entries – yes, we receive many of these, and no, chronology alone is not structure.
Personal narratives that haven’t yet been shaped into stories for readers. We deeply respect the courage it takes to write about difficult experiences, including trauma and abuse. These accounts matter. But publishing requires transforming private testimony into a narrative that can carry readers beyond the author’s individual experience. If your manuscript is still serving a personal healing process, it may not yet be ready for publication – and that’s a valid and
important stage of writing.
Poetry collections (for the most part, though we do make exceptions to this), academic monographs, or heavily illustrated coffee table books.
How to submit
Send the first three chapters as a Word document to submissions@mercierpress.ie. Include:
- Your name and manuscript title on every page
- Pagination throughout
- A one-page synopsis that tells us what happens, not what the book is ‘about.’ If you can’t do this, you have a problem with your story, and it is not ready for submission.
- We read these blind and do not want your bio at this stage or any history of your writing process. We take each story as we find it.
