Our Story
It all began over 30 years ago, when Cheryl Robson and a group of women writers created Aurora Metro Books to develop and publish new writing.
Now regarded as one of the leading independent publishers in the UK with a fine list of over 300 international authors including Germaine Greer, Benjamin Zephaniah, Meera Syal, Sarah Waters, Kit de Waal, Philippa Gregory, AS Byatt, Claire Tomalin, Suchen Christine Lim, Jean-Claude Carriere, Nawal el Saadawi and Mihail Sebastian, we bring you an inspiring range of writers from around 30 different countries.
We also develop and publish new authors and welcome submissions from unpublished authors as well as from agents and literary consultancies. Send to submissions@aurorametro.com
In recognition of our commitment to diverse literature, publisher Cheryl Robson FRSA was a finalist in the ITV National Diversity Awards – for Entrepreneur of the Year in 2022 and for the Lifetime Achievement Category in 2019. She successfully campaigned for 5 years for a statue of Virginia Woolf to be commissioned and erected in Richmond-on-Thames. The statue was finally unveiled on Richmond Riverside on November 16th, 2022 following donations from hundreds of individual donors.
With partner Steve, they opened a bookshop in Richmond to promote and sell diverse books in 2022 at 80 Hill Rise, Richmond TW10 6UB, just up the road from the statue.
Come and visit the bookshop.
See more at www.booksontherise.com Watch a video about publisher Cheryl Robson here.
Aurora Metro was delighted to be named as finalists in the 2019 Music and Drama awards for Outstanding Drama Resource, and in the Independent Publisher Guild’s awards for Diversity in Publishing in 2019 and 2020.
Submit your work – Aurora Metro & Supernova Books
Our Imprints
Aurora Metro Books
Our acclaimed list of fiction includes literary fiction, historical fiction, crime, mystery, romance and novels for Young Adults (broadly in the 10-18 age range), over half of which have been shortlisted for literary awards and prizes.
Translation is one of our passions and we believe in bringing the best foreign authors to an English readership in good, accessible translation. Winning 2 PEN awards and being shortlisted 5 times for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation award shows that we really do care about language and how it communicates a story.
A recent YA book in translation is Girl Out of Place by Syl van Duyn, translated by Ernestine Hoegen. It was shotlisted for the Thea Beckman award in the Netherlands.
Watch the book trailer here.
We have authors from over 30 countries represented on our list, mostly translated into English for the first time.
Supernova Books
We publish both general and specialist non-fiction titles across theatre, film, music, literature, and popular culture.
These general interest/trade books are published under our Supernova imprint, which launched in 2011 with Rupert Booth’s very popular biography of Patrick McGoohan, Not a Number
book-cover-unravelling-women’s-arts
Our highly-regarded and award-winning non-fiction books offer new perspectives on the arts and culture, for example PL. Henderson’s Unravelling Women’s Art.
Fiction is the lifeblood of the publishing industry and we believe it is essential to find new voices. We are developing an enviable stable of fiction writers from the well-known such as Sarah Waters, Kit de Waal, Philippa Gregory, AS Byatt, Jackie Kay, Claire Tomalin, Anne Sebba to the upcoming Fiona Rintoul, Louise Soraya Black , Mary Hamer, Sandro Martini, Avi Sirlin, David Chadwick, Dipika Mukherjee, Kate Dunn, Ewa Dodd and Nikki Dudley.
In 2009, we launched The Virginia Prize for Fiction to discover and help promote new women novelists.
Writer, journalist and translator Fiona Rintoul won the 2013 Virginia Prize with her first novel, The Leipzig Affair: also short-listed for the 2015 Saltire first book of the year award, the novel was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime.
Read a free extract from Fiona’s critically acclaimed, “gripping, complex debut” (2013), on Fiona’s own website here.
You can also listen to The Leipzig Affair adapted for broadcast as the Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.
Our fiction has won or been nominated for numerous prizes including Kirkus Blue Stars and Best Indie
Book Awards.
Theatre is another mainstay. We publish single edition playtexts, predominantly alongside new productions, such as Black Theatre Live’s production of Hamlet, adapted by Mark Norfolk, and an actively growing series of drama anthologies: collections of plays by contemporary playwrights and theatre-makers, and collections grouped by theme such as World Drama. Many of our plays have been named Writers’ Guild Best Plays or garnered Time Out Critics Choice.
Theatre for Young Audiences forms a core of our list: books for, with, by and about work for young people. Ours is a rich collection of contemporary, original British and international work, with plays by several award-winning playwrights, alongside the more familiar, bestselling adaptations of classic stories (e.g. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol).
Our range extends to practical guides and resources by leading writers, directors and theatre-makers, and these are ideal for teachers, students and practitioners at all levels.
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