About us

Our address: 15 Rosetrees. Guildford, Surrey, GU1 2HS, UK
Our email: [email protected]
Our telephone: (44) (0)7795 660 795
@VOLEbooks
facebook.com/VOLEbooks

We are Janice Dempsey & Dónall Dempsey. Both of us write poems. In 2016 we set up a small independent publishing concern, dedicated to publishing poetry. Of course, we had learned and practised our publishing skills on our own poetry pamphlets and collections first (in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group but without our own printing press). In 2013 we'd also begun to publish anthologies of poems by friends and fellow poets for whom we organised free monthly poetry performance events in Guildford, UK, where we live, under the name 'The 1000 Monkeys'. When in 2015 we were asked to publish other poets we knew, we set up Dempsey & Windle, our first imprint, and we began advertising ourselves as publishers in January 2016. Since then we have married (Janice used to be Janice Windle) and have published an average of about fifteen books each year. We're now publishing as VOLE Books, our new imprint. We chose the new name as an anagram of LOVE — we love books, poetry (and, of course, endangered little furry animals).

We keep ourselves busy. During the pandemic in 2019, we made The 1000 Monkeys events into Zoom online readings so they can now be attended to English-speaking poets all over the world, in addition to our local contacts. They are still free to sign up to and attend. As well as publishing books of poetry, we still host these, and also organise and lead occasional face-to face local poetry events in Guildford.

We publish a weekly newsletter with articles about poets and poetry, which ensures that we keep ourselves informed and learning about the writing and reading of poetry in public, as well as publicising our books and the competitions we run. Our biennial pamphlet competition, the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition, gives the winner the opportunity to send us a short collection of their poems for publishing with no accompanying costs, and we run Winter/Spring and Summer/Autumn single poem competitions with cash prizes and anthologies of the short-listed and placed poems sent out free to the contributors.

All of these activities have pages on this website where you can read about them and view the video records we keep on our YouTube channel of the amazing poets who read and write with us. And each poet we've published has a page where you can read about their book. And order it, using Paypal buttons to pay by card if you don't have Paypal account.

We believe that poetry has an important place in the personal life of everyone in the twenty-first century. To quote Peter Sansom (co-founder of The Poetry Business): "I suppose people write poems because they enjoy using words and because they want to create something that didn't exist before [...] We tend to feel that poems are true." – Writing Poems by Peter Sansom (Bloodaxe, 1994).
And, of course, that's why poeple read poetry, as well.