Martha Sprackland – Editor

I am a freelance editor and writer with fourteen years' experience, both in and out of house, in journal and book publishing. Working across fiction, poetry and non-fiction, with an emphasis on literary writing, I am adept in structural and line editing, proofreading; my copy-editing skills are second to none.

I am editor at Offord Road Books, a small, boutique list publishing new and exciting work in poetry by, among others, A. K. Blakemore, Ella Frears, Will Burns, Seán Hewitt and Rebecca Perry. Our beautiful books have been chosen as Recommendations by the Poetry Book Society, have been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, and won the Ledbury Forte Prize (we celebrated with a reading in Paris, days before Notre-Dame burned...). I was previously (until 2021) the lead editor at Poetry London, a long-running international journal publishing established names alongside new and emerging voices, and I am a founding editor of multilingual, multinational arts zine La Errante. From late 2021 I have also been poetry editor for CHEERIO Publications, a production company and publishing house in association with the Estate of Francis Bacon.

Before going freelance in 2016 I worked as an editor at Faber & Faber, helping bring landmark titles to publication from both front- and backlist, by a dazzling roster that included T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage, Paul Muldoon and Sylvia Plath, as well as the Faber New Poets. I worked on prose books including Echo's Bones, a previously unpublished short story by Samuel Beckett, and essential volumes of The Letters of T. S. Eliot and The Poems of T. S. Eliot. On the non-fiction side, I worked on the Guardian–Faber list on titles including Patrick Kingsley's The New Odyssey, Gary Younge's Another Day in the Death of America, and popular science books by Dean Burnett. More recently, I worked at Unbound as an editor, for a year's worth of maternity cover, working on a wide range of book including a collection of essays by British hijabis, a co-written comic novel, a new version of the Morte D'Arthur, and many more.

In my freelance life I work for a number of publishers and arts organisations, including the Arvon Foundation, Bloomsbury, Canongate, the T. S. Eliot Estate, Faber, Granta, Oneworld, Pan Macmillan, 4th Estate, Persephone Books, The Poetry Review and many more. I have offered manuscript assessment services and mentorship to writers hoping to brush up their book pre-submission, via both The Literary Consultancy, the Rebecca Swift Foundation and Faber Academy.

I work closely with authors, both in prose and in poetry, to make sure their manuscript is as pin-sharp as it possibly can be, its images bright and clear, its dialogue fluid and convincing, its narrative arc strong and compelling. I'm a writer myself, and I know the value of intensive, rigorous editorial feedback to a work-in-progress, and the je ne sais quoi (except often we do know what) it takes to bring that last polish to a promising draft.

Whether you're just getting going and need to check the bare bones of a piece, you've reached a first draft and need to put it through its paces, or else you're ready to start sending out to agents and publishers, I will ensure that your work sings.

Above all, I love this work – always have – and am committed to books, to publishers, and to the wonderful authors I am excited to work with here.

You needn't necessarily take my word for it! Here is a jubilant parade of satisfied customers, both publishers and authors.

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