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Michael Schmidt Papers

Date range: 1948-2017

Medium: Archive

Papers of Michael Schmidt (b 1947), OBE, poet, novelist, critic and publisher.

Michael Schmidt founded the literary publishing house, Carcanet Press, in Oxford in 1969. He took up a part-time teaching post at Manchester University in 1972, bringing the Press with him. A year later, with Brian Cox, he founded the literary magazine Poetry Nation, which became PN Review. Along with managing the Press and editing PN Review, he has held academic posts at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Glasgow, and Bolton University. He was Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge during 2012-14, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He has published ten volumes of poetry, two novels, several major works of criticism, and countless introductions, essays and editorials.

The archive includes:

  • Research notes and notes on recent and contemporary poetry;
  • Drafts, manuscripts, typescripts and proofs of many of Schmidt's publications;
  • Appointment diaries;
  • Personal documents;
  • Papers relating to his various academic roles;
  • Correspondence with publishers, writers, family and friends.

See also:

Further information:

  • Basic catalogue of the material dating 1948-1992 available via Special Collections Reading Rooms.
  • Post-1992 material is uncatalogued.
  • See also Stella K. Halkyard and C. B. McCully, `"Thoughts of Inventive Brains and the Rich Effusions of Deep Hearts": Some of the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 77, no. 2 (1995), pp. 105-21.

Location:


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