Robyn Marsack 
Fifty Fifty 
Carcanet’s Jubilee in Letters

A Book of the Year 2019 in The Morning Star.This is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a small, ambitious press over a period of radical transformation in publishing. Each of Carcanet’s fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters — handwritten, typed, and now emailed — between an author and the editor.Beginning in 1969 with the response to an invitation to subscribe to Carcanet for two guineas, the book traces Carcanet’s progress and offers insight into the nature of literary editing. At its heart is the personal relationship of author and editor/publisher, the conflicts, friendships and vicissitudes that occur at the nexus between the work, its creator, publisher and reader. Poets are central, but fiction writers, translators, biographers and critics also contribute to the Carcanet ferment and firmament. Fifty Fifty celebrates the writers’, readers’ and editor’s risks, passions and pleasures.

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Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as well as managing director of Carcanet Press. He lives in Manchester.