Founder.
Lepus Print was founded in September 2021 by the writer Brian Leyden with support from the creative community. A highly regarded full-time writer of novels, non-fiction, short stories, essays, plays and radio documentaries, his experience as a mentor and in giving creative writing workshops confirmed the need for a dedicated imprint with a strongly regional identity based in the border region. His early experience as a contributor and then as editor with the Irish Literary Journal, Force 10, founded by Dermot Healy, and then on First Cut and The Cathach during his term as Writer in Residence with Leitrim and Sligo Libraries reinforced his determination to further a tradition of literary publication in the region through journals, anthologies and broadsheets, the most recent of which includes The Cormorant and Winter Papers. Lepus Print represents a step-up into book publishing. The imprint is a response to a changing marketplace for books with massification and the shrinkage of alternatives on the one hand, and more accommodating, small-scale independent book production on the other, nourished by independent booksellers, bookshops and readers, and such intangibles as memory, imagination and community.