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Shearsman

About Shearsman
    Shearsman was founded in 1981 out of the ashes of a magazine called Imprint that I had been co-editing while living in Hong Kong. In 1981 and 1982 eight issues of the magazine appeared, all edited from Kuala Lumpur, whither I had moved from Hong Kong. The logistics eventually became too much, especially with further changes of domicile on my part and, from 1983 to 1991, Shearsman was subsumed within the journal Ninth Decade (later Tenth Decade) along with Ian Robinson's Oasis and Robert Vas Dias' Atlantic Review. In 1991 however, ND/TD had run its course, and both Oasis and Shearsman arose from its ashes. This time around, I made the journal much smaller, in order to reduce postage costs, and eventually the new version of Shearsman settled down to an A5-sized 32-page journal, produced cheaply but regularly.

If the journal has a ruling aesthetic, it is one informed by international modernism and by the more radical kinds of poetry that appeared in the USA and the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not an exclusive magazine though, and remains open to all comers, wherever they may come from and whoever they may be, conservative or radical: the important thing is the quality of the writing. 

The magazine now exists also in an online version and this development has allowed me to do things that would be impossible in the print journal, such as to introduce visual materials, to publish book reviews as and when they are ready and to include material that is not in the print version. There are also Recommended Books, a Book-of-the-Month feature, and free e-books. The print journal goes on, however, and will do so as long as there is an audience for it.

Tony Frazer
Editor, Shearsman



Subscription
Subscription rates:

UK Annual £14
Single issue
£8.50
Rest of Europe
Annual                          £17
Rest of the world
Annual                          £18

Payments should be made in favour of "Shearsman Books Ltd", and should be made in pounds sterling (cheque, postal order or international money-order), given the cost of converting small amounts of foreign currency through the banking system. One- and two-year subscriptions, as well as single copies, may however be purchased through the online store on this site without payment of any surcharge, and single copies may also be purchased through the retail book trade like any of our book titles.