Hillfire Press is Here!

It makes my heart race to see that logo set onto the grey bar at the top of the website. It’s real! Finally.

I’m very excited to introduce Hillfire Press Edinburgh and the Hillfire Anthology.

I dreamed this up when I was sad that my MSc in creative writing had come to an end all too soon, and all too suddenly, at the end of 2020. Our cohort was made up of amazing people, fantastic writers, publishers, designers and team players. I did not want to lose that – and what better way to keep the momentum going than to put all that talent to good use and publish an anthology together.

The beautiful logo is Anna O’Connor’s interpretation of a gorse flower and branch. It was artfully integrated into this website by Juliann Guerra, our web-designer. The list of people I am grateful to is long, so I will stick to those two for now, because it’s their work you can already see. Check out the team page to see who else deserves thanks!

And do have a look at ‘Our Story’ to see how Hillfire came about.

After I had the idea to do this, some very tentative reaching out to people soon became not-so-very-tentative anymore. Everybody was excited, and once I had a core team together, the only thing holding us back was how busy we all are. We are writing, studying, working and living on different continents while we are making this happen. Oh, and there is a global pandemic going on, not to mention the climate crisis and various more localised crises threatening our democracies. We need shared projects with a future more than ever, projects that bring people together, and that is what I am attempting with Hillfire Press. I hope that our excitement for bringing this anthology to life and our shared enthusiasm will be palpable in Volume 1, and I can’t wait to share it with you when we’re ready to publish in May 2022.

I’ll leave it here for now, but not without saying: please pre-order the Hillfire Anthology, you’ll make our day!

For the Hillfire Team,
Lena Kraus, Editor-in-Chief.