Founded in 2020 by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, Hajar Press is an independent and proudly political publishing house run by and for people of colour.

What is our mission?

Hajar Press was born out of frustration with the mainstream publishing industry — its institutional racism, commercial trend-following and domination by Amazon. As a political publisher, we seek to address structural inequalities critically, rejecting ‘diversity’ as a means to combat racism and instead building something new, led by and for our own communities. By writing on our own terms, we want to honour our histories, imagine new horizons and strengthen our collective power.

Who was Hajar?

In the Abrahamic traditions, Hajar, or Hagar, was the Egyptian handmaiden of Abraham’s wife Sarah and the mother of Ishmael. Abraham married Hajar so that she might bear him children, but after Sarah later gave birth to her own son, Isaac, she insisted that Hajar and Ishmael be banished into the desert.

Hajar represents the racialised people who perform the hidden labour that maintains society but are then disposed of and cast into the margins. In Arabic, the root h-j-r means to migrate.

What do we publish?

We publish creatively ambitious and politically engaged literature by writers of colour, from novels and short stories to poetry and essays. We especially focus on experimental work that blends forms and bends genres.

We are interested in writing that reflects how politics are lived and felt, whether conveying histories of resistance passed down generations, or embodying how the future is prefigured and enacted today.

In short, we publish beautiful, revolutionary books that move us to think, feel, dream and imagine anew.