NeWest Press is one of Canada's first independent literary publishing houses. NeWest publishes literary fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, and drama, as well as a line of mystery novels, with a particular interest in books by Western Canadian authors.
In 1977, a small group of Edmonton writers and academics took a stand: Western Canadian authors would not be beholden to publishers in Toronto to put their words to print. This group created NeWest Press to showcase the work of writers from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, launching a small publishing house with significant literary heft. Writers like Rudy Wiebe, Myrna Kostash, Grant MacEwan and Robert Kroetsch have published through NeWest, and scores of new writers have launched careers here.
A big part of their success comes from the unique way they acquire manuscripts.
“We’re kind of idiosyncratic still because we have this origin as this collective of writers and editors and academics,” says NeWest’s general manager, Paul Matwychuk.
“We don’t have an acquisitions editor; as such, we have a group of volunteers who read the manuscripts that come in, and in an effort so that no one person has undue influence over the publishing program, three people have to read the manuscript and give it a thumbs-up before we publish it.”
The readers are usually board members, and the list is like a who’s-who of Alberta’s literati, including founding members Douglas Barbour and Diane Bessai. They receive literary novels and short story collections, mostly, but they also publish poetry, nonfiction, drama, literary criticism and some genres such as mysteries.
NeWest is also known for its Nunatak First Fiction series that published novels from first-time novelists like Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields, which won numerous awards and was one of the books chosen for CBC’s Canada Reads in 2008.
