Luke Allan

Luke Allan – Editor

Expert editor, copy-editor and editorial consultant specialising in poetry.

Overview

I run a publishing house and poetry magazine in Oxford. Before that I was Managing Editor at Carcanet Press and Deputy Editor at PN Review. I've edited about three hundred books spanning poetry, prose fiction and literary non-fiction. Books I've worked on have gone on to win the Forward Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Costa Prize, the Shine Strong Award, and the Seamus Heaney Prize.

I hold degrees in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and the University of Oxford. I've given talks and seminars at the universities of Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oxford. I co-judged the 2015 Singapore Prize for Poetry, the 2017 PN Review Prize for Poetry and Translation, and the 2018 and 2020 Hollingworth Prizes. My poems have received the Northern Promise Award, the Charles Causley Prize, and the Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award.

My services include editorial assessment, developmental editing, copy-editing, and consultation. I specialise in poetry.
Services
Fiction
Poetry
Languages
English (UK) English (US)
Awards
  • 2021 Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award
  • 2019 Charles Causley Poetry Prize

Work experience

Carcanet Press Ltd

Dec, 2014 — Aug, 2018 (over 3 years)

Sine Wave Peak

Feb, 2012 — Present

Portfolio

‘We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,’ writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter o... read more
In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine - never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around... read more
As When

Tom Raworth

As When spans the range of Tom Raworth's poetry to date, and includes work omitted from his Collected Poems (2003) as well as poems previously only issued as fugitive cards and broadsides. This edition of Tom Raworth's poems is beautifully arranged, with an in... read more
A moving new collection from one of America’s greatest poets, now in paperback.For more than sixty years, the poems of John Ashbery have served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. Wi... read more
Selected Verse

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of English poetry's truly distinctive stylists, a supreme technician, with an unbelievable mastery over sound (Edith Sitwell). He was one of the major poets of the Victorian era, and almost certainly the most prov... read more
Farm by the Shore

Thomas A Clark

In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark explores the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands through experience of covering the ground. His notations and fragments keep the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation. ... read more
Herne the Hunter

Peter McDonald

Herne the Hunter is the sixth collection from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore. In McDonal... read more
This book marks the UK debut of Canadian poet Sheri Benning, featuring new poems alongside work previously published in Canada. Benning's early work draws on her strongly felt connection to her native landscape, rural Saskatchewan. In poems that couple sinew a... read more
Haunted House

Pierre Reverdy

Haunted House
Holy Toledo!

John Clegg

R.F. Langley is known for his meticulous observation of the natural world and his highly original voice. This volume brings together his two previous Carcanet collections, Collected Poems (2000) and The Face of It (2007), along with his celebrated but uncollec... read more
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It's About Time

Stanley Moss

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Breezeway

John Ashbery

Breezeway
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Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale's Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound's Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into ... read more
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Dirt

William Letford

Poems on illness and healing, gathered over the past few years, published by Animate Projects as an artwork composed with and for the patients and staff of Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, Glasgow.
A genealogy of place-names relating to colour in The Cabrach, the region of the Scottish uplands lying between the Cairngorms and Strathbogie. The area's history of settlement, transhumance and wayfaring is hinted at in its place-names, particularly those ment... read more
14 conspectuses on the Isle of Skye for viewing hills and mountains. The book accompanies a blog featuring commentaries, photographs, word-mntn drawings, and illustrations.
A new collection of pensée on mountains, walking and viewing, illustrated with photographs of word-mntn.
A book documenting 23 silent walks in remembrance of the victims of conflict to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War, 17th June - 30th August, 2014
Global Oracle

Alec Finlay

A book-length illustrated poem interweaving the bee-cults of the ancient world, most famously the Melissai of the Delphic oracle, with the science of apiology, bee communication, and the predominant 'oracle' of our era, the Navstar satellite system.
An account of the traditions, stories, and ideas that inspired the National Memorial for Organ and Tissue Donors, a wilding garden and drystane Taigh, constructed this year in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh.
the road north

Ken Cockburn

the road north is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Osu-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. K... read more
A work of collaged contemporary history - this book-length poem is composed entirely from individuals submissions to the Smith Commission. The text brings out a range of ideas and issues in the guise of rhetorical, personal and quirky voices, juxtaposing contr... read more
What Must Happen

Jeffrey Wainwright

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New Selected Poems

Shuntaro Tanikawa

New Selected Poems
Several Deer

Adam Crothers

Addressing themes of destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, form, failure and rock n roll, "Several Deer" is the debut collection by a Northern Irish writer as much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. The po... read more
Marrying the Ugly Millionaire
The Observances

Kate Miller

Observances
Spills

Angela Leighton

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Skies

Alison Brackenbury

The beauty of the Goucestershire landscape and sky-scape are Alison Brackenbury's commanding theme, her landscapes are historied, the skies always in vivid motion, moving towards elegy. The two World Wars and their poets are present, but also the nearer histor... read more
Herne the Hunter

Peter McDonald

Herne the Hunter is the sixth collection from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore. In McDonal... read more
Muddy River: Selected Poems

Sergey Stratanovsky

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Playing the Octopus

Mary O'Malley

The Number Poems

Matthew Welton

Pandemonium

Thomas McCarthy

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The Occupant

Jane Draycott

Keats Lives

Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon's new collection reaches back into the long past, showing how traces left behind - textile fragments, buried thimbles, cave paintings - enable us to make imaginative connections with our distant ancestors, emphasising the commonalities of human liv... read more
World Before Snow
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Moon for Sale

Richard Price

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Poems

Alain-Fournier

Through

David Herd

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Winter Migrants

Tom Pickard

Long Pass

Joey Connolly

On Balance

Sinead Morrissey

Seasonal Disturbances

Karen McCarthy Woolf

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Complete Poems

Muriel Spark

In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those... read more
Cavalcanty

Peter Hughes

Blotter

Oli Hazzard

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Sarajevo Roses

Rory Waterman

Collected Poems

Lorna Goodison

Diary of the Last Man

Robert Minhinnick

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Poems

Yves Bonnefoy

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Raking Light

Eric Langley

Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer's four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo ... read more
Mexico in My Heart

Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as ‘a superb act of... read more
stack

James Davies

Smoothie

Claudine Toutoungi

Collected Poems

Dennis O'Driscoll

Fast

Jorie Graham

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Steep Tea

Jee Leong Koh

The poems in Jee Leong Koh's Steep Tea are rich in detail of the worlds he explores and invents as he follows his desire for an unknown other, moving tentatively, passionately, always uncertain of himself. His language is colloquial, musical, aware of the infu... read more
Zoology

Gillian Clarke

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them - wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chl... read more

Luke has 27 reviews

Professionalism

Quality

Value

Responsiveness

All The Things T.

All The Things T.

Apr, 2021

Very grateful for Luke's work and help making my book of poetry reach its greatest potential!
Kiran B.

Kiran B.

Dec, 2020

Luke is an excellent editor. One can tell that he takes advantage of his poet eye to really gleam over what is working and not on the sentence level of your writing. His edits are comprehensive and well considered. He will make your manuscript look as professional and polished as possible. He is wonderful to work with, if you are looking for someone who really wants to hold your hand on the se...
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Martin M.

Martin M.

Nov, 2020

Very helpful advice and constructive criticism!
Luke M.

Luke M.

Sep, 2020

I'm very grateful to Luke for helping me. He accommodated my change of plans and gave more than I asked for. I can recommend him without hesitation.
Gary G.

Gary G.

Sep, 2020

Great work!

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