About Us

About House of Anansi Press

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey.

Anansi started as a small press with a mandate to publish only Canadian writers, and quickly gained attention for publishing significant authors such as Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and Erín Moure, as well as George Grant and Northrop Frye.

In June 2002, House of Anansi was purchased from Stoddart Publishing by Scott Griffin, the founder of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. Today, the company specializes in finding and developing Canada's great new writers of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, while maintaining a culturally significant backlist that has accumulated in the 45 years since the house was founded.

Anansi books have been regularly recognized by prize juries at home and abroad, including appearances on the longlists and shortlists of all major Canadian prizes as well as the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In recent years, Anansi titles have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the A. M. Klein Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Trillium Book Award.

In 2005, Anansi expanded its business by acquiring the venerable children's publisher Groundwood Books.

In 2010, the company launched Spiderline, a new imprint dedicated to the ever-popular crime fiction genre. In the same year, another imprint, Anansi International, was started to reflect the company's commitment to publishing the best voices from around the world.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.