Invisible poetry: women, ethnic minorities and the forgotten history of Carcanet magazine

Before it became a leading poetry publisher, Carcanet was a student magazine set up by undergraduates who wanted to link Oxford and Cambridge. This article sheds light on the forgotten history of Carcanet magazine, focusing particularly on women and ethnic minorities. Prior to Michael Schmidt’s takeover of the magazine in late 1967, Carcanet offered opportunities to writers from India and ex-colonies (including Adil Jussawalla and Edward Brathwaite) to publish their work, before moving on to more mainstream venues. Carcanet magazine can be seen as a site of struggle between various players: between the Oxford and Cambridge literary sets, and between British/European and postcolonial groups. Drawing on extensive archival work in neglected collections, as well as oral history interviews, this article tells an alternative history of Carcanet magazine as a case study for the larger literary field of post-war Britain. The story is less focused on Michael Schmidt, without diminishing his accomplishment in transforming a student magazine into an enduring publishing enterprise.