‘I love Nightjar… Consistently lovingly made and excellently written’ Jenn Ashworth                                                                                                                        

Nightjar Press is an indie press specialising in limited edition single short-story chapbooks. The publisher and editor is Nicholas Royle; design is by John Oakey. Royle and Oakey previously worked together on Joel Lane’s The Earth Wire (1994), from British Fantasy Award-winning Egerton Press, which also published Darklands (1991) and Darklands 2 (1992).

The nightjar – aka corpse fowl or goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies silently at dusk or dawn as it hunts for food. The nightjar is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. In her poem ‘Goatsucker’, Sylvia Plath wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’.

Submission guidelines: we are open to submissions from writers who have taken the trouble to research what kind of stuff we like. All that means is we like it when a submission comes in from someone whose name we recognise because they have previously placed an order. This does not mean we give them preferential treatment or are more likely to offer to publish their work. It’s the work itself that is most important and we would sooner publish a brilliant story by a writer who has never ordered a Nightjar than a less-interesting piece from a writer who has a complete collection. We publish individual stories, previously unpublished, between 2000 and 5000 words, that have something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful and, increasingly, but not exclusively, the experimental, about them. Word files are best; PDFs are a bit of a pain. We try, and often fail, to respond to submissions quickly.

‘Nightjar Press has the best running commentary on the public psychology of book fairs’ Jessica Bonder

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