Nick Owen Publishing is a small, independent publishing space for writing that lives between literature, satire, education, and public life. Some of the work here is comic. Some of it is reflective or quietly serious. Much of it is interested in ageing, obsession, institutions, love, failure, and the strange theatre of modern professional life. This site gathers that work — books, essays, projects, and occasional mischief — without insisting that it all behave in the same way.
If this sounds like your kind of place, you’re very welcome.
If you’re new here
The easiest way in is not to start with a catalogue, but with context.
→ Meet the Mischief Makers
(who we are, why this exists and how to read NOP)
Or, if you’d rather begin with our work…
At our centre sits a single, unfolding work: The Grand Slams of an Ageing Tennis Player: a quartet following the adventures of an ageing tennis player through time, memory, obsession, failure and redemption.
→ Why not start with Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player?
A quiet note
Nick Owen Publishing isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. We value attentiveness over scale, continuity over novelty, and readers who are happy to stay a little longer than the algorithm expects.
If you’re new to NOP and want to find out more about our publications, why not start with our Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series below? It’s what got everything started!
Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player
“I don’t like your attitude!” snaps “Serena Williams” as we square up over the club’s dubious grass courts. But I am “Andy Murray”, the greatest tennis GOAT ever, no really I am and you “Serena” are blocking me from my ultimate goal: chairman of our local club.
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player
“Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.” (Jacques Barzun)
Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant
The third in the “Confessions” series, Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant picks up from where The Courting Lives left off and tracks Andy’s inexorable rise to become the greatest GOAT: or Greatest of All Times as they have it in contemporary tennis parlance by challenging for the French Grand Slam at Roland Garros. But the thwarted love stories continue and take on a darker tone as his fans become more fanatical: ambition, delusion, unrequited love… it’s all here in…
The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player
Inspired by Rip Van Winkle, the short story by Washington Irving, The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player is the fourth and final book in this ‘Confessions’ series. Andy Murray wakes up twelve years late, trapped in a hospice that feels more like a prison, with his memory missing, his bar bill unpaid, and the US Open still somehow to be won. A darkly comic, surreal finale to the cult Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series.
