Kirsten Bell, the Director of Caw Press, is an Australian, Canadian and British social anthropologist living in London. She received her PhD in 2000 from James Cook University in Australia and over the past twenty-five years has worked at universities in the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK. She became interested in publishing after a five-year stint as an editor of an international journal, which introduced her to the backstage of scholarly publishing and where she honed her skills in diplomacy and structural editing (the former remains sadly lacking).
In 2016, convinced that academics had got themselves into a huge mess because they had been far too willing to outsource publishing – the fulcrum of academic knowledge production! – to corporate interests, she took a year off to complete an intensive Master of Publishing at Simon Fraser University: Canada’s premier training ground for publishing professionals. In the programme, she gained in experience in all aspects of book and periodical publishing, including marketing, editing, production, distribution and design. The basic concept for Caw Press evolved during the programme.
After a six-year inception period, Caw Press was realised in 2022 – or, rather, it moved from a vague idea to a publishing experiment. The experiment is Silent but Deadly: Caw Press’s first (and currently sole) book. Although this book has been written by Bell herself, rest assured that this press is not some sort of elaborate hoax to disguise her self-publishing endeavours. She does eventually want to publish other people’s books! But in this experimental phase, she didn’t think it was right to kill (or, at least, torture) anyone’s darlings but her own.