Public voting in The Saboteur Awards ends midnight tomorrow night (9th May).

Sidekick Books, the small press publisher I co-run with Kirsten Irving, has been shortlisted in the Most Innovative Publisher category. We publish exclusively collaborative books – sometimes team-ups between writers and artists, sometimes multi-author anthologies that might mix poetry with visual art, essays or comics. But our major claim to innovation of late is publishing the Headbooks series: interactive handbooks that fuse scrapbooking, game and activity pages with visual poetry, factual content, collages and calligrams.

The first book in the series, Aquanauts, is also shortlisted this year for Best Anthology. I spent a large-ish chunk of 2017 soliciting work for this book from some of the finest poets and experimental writers I know, editing it, designing it, creating the cover artwork (see above), choosing the right printer, organising a semi-immersive/immersible launch party and gently sliding the finished book under the noses of bookshop owners, so I’m immensely pleased that it’s made the shortlist.

If you own or have seen a copy and think it does the trick, please consider heading over to the Saboteur Awards website to vote for it, and for Sidekick. Equally, if you have any familiarity with and interest in the half-underground world of British poetry, head on over and vote for the best in any of the fields. Make the process as democratic as possible.