Merky Books

Stormzy has said his instinct in creating the imprint was knowing too many talented writers who were "just not getting very far." That impulse, shared with editorial director Tom Avery, became #Merky Books when Penguin Random House UK and the grime artist's team launched the imprint in July 2018. It operates within the Cornerstone list at the company's Pimlico headquarters in London. The first title was Stormzy's own memoir, Rise Up, co-written with Jude Yawson and published in autumn 2018.

The list spans fiction, non-fiction and poetry, centred on authors from the global majority. Early releases included Taking Up Space by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi and Derek Owusu's verse novel That Reminds Me in 2019. The roster has since grown to include Keisha the Sket, Malorie Blackman's autobiography Just Sayin', Caster Semenya's The Race to Be Myself, and Hafsa Zayyan's We Are All Birds of Uganda. Owusu returned to the imprint with The Recovery House, a novel following a young poet navigating a recovery house after a mental breakdown.

A defining part of the imprint's work is its annual New Writers' Prize, now in its seventh edition. Open to unpublished, un-agented Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic writers aged 18 to 35 in the UK and Republic of Ireland, it offers the winner a publishing contract and invites all shortlisted writers to a Writers' Camp with editorial workshops and one-to-one feedback.

A reader who lands on a #Merky Books title through a friend's recommendation or a shortlist is likely to find a book that treats its characters and setting with seriousness and formal ambition, even when the subject matter is raw. The editorial team is young and drawn from the communities it publishes, and that proximity shows: the books tend to pair structural risk with emotional directness, and they trust the reader to sit inside discomfort without being guided away from it.