Independent publishing with mischief, memory and moral curiosity

Nick Owen Publishing exists to entertain, provoke, question and occasionally misbehave. We publish books that refuse to sit quietly in their allotted categories. Some are comic. Some are satirical. Some are strange, tender, unruly or unashamedly eccentric. Some play games with truth, memory and identity. Others bear witness to the moments when truth itself becomes fragile, dangerous or urgently necessary.

Our motto,  the truth, the whole truth and anything but the truth, began as a mischievous promise. It still is. But it is also a serious editorial principle. NOP is interested in the many ways stories help us understand the world: through laughter, exaggeration, confession, poetry, testimony, memory, argument, absurdity and hope.

We believe that books can entertain without being trivial. They can be funny without being careless. They can be political without being propaganda. They can be personal without being small. Above all, they can remind us that human beings are rarely reducible to headlines, slogans or tidy explanations.

From comic confessions to urgent witness

NOP’s publishing list began with the gloriously unreliable world of the Confessions series: comic sporting memoirs, fictionalised delusions, impossible ambitions, ageing bodies, wounded pride, romantic confusion, office pets, club cats, wandering dogs and the occasional appearance of greatness, whether deserved or entirely imagined.

The Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player quartet remains central to the NOP spirit: playful, self-mocking, affectionate and absurd. Across Wimbledon, Melbourne, Paris and New York, Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch pursues sporting immortality with more confidence than evidence, surrounded by coaches, rivals, companions and creatures who often understand the world better than he does.

But NOP has never only been about comedy. Our list includes plays, poems, travel writing, reflections on work and identity and books that explore how people survive institutions, histories, mistakes, longings and systems larger than themselves.

What connects the NOP list?

At first glance, a comic tennis confession, a travelogue, a play script, a poem from an irritated England and a diary from Tehran at war may seem unlikely companions.

But NOP books share a family resemblance.

They are interested in:

• unreliable narrators and unreliable nations;
• the comedy of human self-importance;
• the dignity of ordinary life;
• the gap between public performance and private feeling;
• the strange persistence of hope;
• cultural memory, personal memory and selective memory;
• the voices that get missed when the loudest people dominate the room.

Our books often ask: Who gets to tell the story? Who is being laughed at? Who is being listened to? What happens when the official version is not enough?

Sometimes the answer is a comic monologue. Sometimes it is a poem. Sometimes it is a play. Sometimes it is a diary written under bombardment.

Our publishing worlds

Confessions

The Confessions books are NOP’s comic engine room: a growing world of sporting aspiration, emotional overreach, ageing ambition and affectionate absurdity. These books celebrate the foolish grandeur of human beings who are never quite as heroic as they imagine — and are all the more lovable for it.

Mischiefs

NOP mischief is not simply silliness. It is a way of seeing. It notices pomposity, punctures certainty and asks awkward questions with a raised eyebrow. Mischief allows us to approach serious matters sideways, with humour as both shield and scalpel.

Poetries

Our poetry explores irritation, identity, place, belonging and the odd emotional weather of contemporary life. It gives language to the things that grumble beneath the surface.

Plays

NOP’s playscripts are theatrical, argumentative and alive to the pleasures of performance. They belong to a world of voices, collisions, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths.

Travelogues

Our travel writing is less about destinations than encounters: with places, histories, habits, misunderstandings and the self one accidentally takes along for the journey.

Theories and Workings

NOP also publishes reflective and practical writing about business, creativity, leadership, mess, worth and working life. These books sit where experience meets experiment.

Witness

With When the Sparrows Grow Anxious, NOP opens a new space in its list: books of witness, cultural memory and international human experience. These are works that ask readers to slow down, look closely and recognise the human texture behind world events.

Read, laugh, argue, remember

We invite readers, reviewers, booksellers, librarians, teachers, reading groups, cultural organisations and the merely curious to explore the NOP list.

Come for the confessions. Stay for the mischief. Wander into the plays. Loiter among the poems. Take the travelogue. Consider the theories. And now, listen to the sparrows.

Because publishing should not only sell books.

It should open windows.

Even when the windows have been taped against the blast.