How to apply for Copyright Permission:

Do you need to include work by a Carcanet author or from a Carcanet title in an anthology, essay, book, digital resource, musical setting, broadcast, film or other context?

Carcanet Press Ltd controls and asserts intellectual property rights on behalf of most of the poets it publishes in accordance with the International Copyright Law (Berne Convention 1886; UCC, 1952; Geneva, 1996). This establishes in international law the right of the author to be recognised as the creator of the work, prevents unauthorised changes to the work, and affirms the author’s right to receive full acknowledgement and fair reward for use of that work in any context by others.

We have a standard minimum fee for the use of a poem or extract which was set by the Society of Authors in 2018. The minimum fee for use of an extract is £72. We will however take into account the nature of the publication and we may decide to vary the fee.

A specimen calculation: for a 10 line poem the charge for world anthology quotation rights is £152, for UK/Commonwealth £76. The fees rise line by line and with additional forms of use (digital, audio, etc). We are happy to negotiate fees in relation to print runs, critical quotation (often covered by ‘fair dealing,’ see below*), specific territories, charitable purposes, community use etc.

Permissions Requests:

Please make your requests in a timely fashion. If you have not had a response within 4 weeks of your request, please resend with URGENT in the subject.

In order to process your permission request, we will need the following information:

Invoicee
Name/title/position
Company
Contact details (address and email)

Your publication
What is the title of your projected publication?
What is the nature of your projected publication (anthology, essay, performance, adaptation, broadcast, etc)?
Who will publish it and in what medium/media?
What is the recommended retail price, ticket price etc?
What territories do you require? (World, UK/Commonwealth, etc)?
How many copies will be produced?
What is the projected date of publication?
What other rights are requested (for different formats, electronic, e-book etc)?
If web publication is requested, what is the URL?
Any relevant additional information

What do you want to quote?
Copyright Information
Author/Translator/Editor of the work you want to use
Poem or work title
Number of lines to be used (please also include total number of lines for poem/extract, e.g 19 out of 25)
Title of volume from which the work is taken and page number

Please send your request to Rights Manager by email to Permissions@carcanet.co.uk or by post to:

Rights Manager
Carcanet Press Limited
4th floor Alliance House
30 Cross Street
Manchester M2 7AQ
United Kingdom


Please note: If Carcanet Press Ltd does not control the rights you are seeking we will refer you on to the legal copyright holder.


*Fair Dealing or Fair Use:

There are certain circumstances where you may be allowed to copy extracts from copyrighted works without permission. These circumstances are set out in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This is called fair dealing in the UK and fair use in the USA.

Fair dealing or fair use is a guideline we generally follow but in certain circumstances Carcanet will give you permission to copy extracts from our copyrighted works that may go beyond what is allowed under fair dealing. However, Carcanet makes the final decision (it is a guideline, not a law). If we judge the amount of quoted material to be excessive, we can charge. Our guidelines are as follows:

If a publication is for a purely academic market and for ‘the purposes of criticism or review’, we allow:

the quotation of 10 lines, or multiple extracts up to 25 lines, dispersed throughout your work from an individual poem without charge, providing that this does not constitute over 25 per cent of the poem. Please note: an ‘individual’ poem does not include book-long poems; these are treated like a play (see below). A long poem with several parts is treated as if each part is an individual poem

up to 250 words of prose, or multiple extracts up to 800 words, dispersed throughout your work. In a collection of essays, it is treated as 250 words per essay

up to 18 lines of a play/book poem, or multiple extracts up to 70 lines, dispersed throughout your work.

Please note that to qualify as an academic publication, a book must have a total print run of 500 or fewer in hardback, or 1,500 or fewer in paperback. Otherwise, we reserve the right to charge full Trade rates.

The Society of Authors sets out its guidelines on its website but ultimately, the decision is the publisher’s and we reserve the right to charge if we believe the aggregate amount of material quoted is substantial enough to do so.