Stairwell To Heaven: York’s Most Passionate Indie Publisher Turns Twenty One This Year

Since its birth in a stairwell in Connecticut, it’s been quite a ride! Stairwell Books founders Rose Drew and Alan Gillott reflect on how it all began…

‘It was 1994 and I was a single mum living in a house in Connecticut, about 45 minutes from New York City,’ remembers Rose Drew, the editorial half of the team.

‘To make ends meet I had to rent out the upper part of the house, and the woman who lived upstairs was a cellist. The sound of cello music would fill the house; it was glorious. She was very lovely and one day she said to me “What do you do for fun?” so I said I did poetry.

‘Not long after this she thrust a newspaper cutting at me and grabbed my four-year-old, Emily, by her little hand and said “Right - off you go.” She had found an open mic happening nearby. So I went, clutching the poems I’d written when I was 16 or 17 — and I liked it and when I came back it started me writing again. I hadn’t written for many years but within weeks I’d written about 80 poems.

‘I took to reading them in the connecting stairwell between the top floor flat and the main floor, and so we’d sit there in the stairwell. She was a teacher and she would offer advice.’

It was the start of an open mic habit that would lead, not long after, to Rose meeting her husband-to-be, Alan Gillott, at events in nearby Stamford.

‘I think it took us a year of not talking to each other,’ recalls Alan, the logistics and tech side of the partnership. ‘Then we were sitting together on the couch and that’s where it started. Suddenly we started talking and things happened.’

An open mic, Rose points out, is a great showcase for the real you:

‘At an open mic you are yourself; you’re reading about what’s important to you. You’re not on a date where you pretend to be nicer than you are or prettier than you are or have more money than you do. We were at an open mic so he knew I used two canes and had a special needs daughter and really hated George Bush.’

Alan also got to showcase his Englishness, which didn’t hurt his cause. ‘It is true that we like a British accent,’ confesses Rose. ‘We liked how he sounded and what he said — it was all different and fresh to people in Stamford, Connecticut.’

Their meeting was of broader benefit to the poets around them when they launched their own open mic events and then, just before relocating to Alan’s homeland, published an anthology.

‘We decided to bring out a book of poetry as a goodbye present to our regulars at the open mic,’ explains Rose. ‘They sent us poems and we brought out a book and made all the mistakes.’

These included forgetting page numbers, neglecting to put the title on the spine, misspelling a famous author’s name on the back cover, and wildly over-ordering the print run.

‘We believed them!’ wails Rose. ‘They said “Oh - I’ll order 20 copies!” so we ordered 250 and then it got down to “Actually, I’ll just take two…” and we’re like, oh god… To this day we still have some copies of First Tuesday in Wilton. We can burn them for warmth.’

Arriving in York for Rose to pursue her PhD in archaeology (she is an internationally renowned expert on ancient human bones and is still regularly employed on digs), Rose immediately felt the lack of an open mic. So she and Alan set up their own. They’ve run them ever since. Their annual Poetry For All events at the National Centre for Early Music and monthly open mics in The Exhibition Pub have been part of the creative calendar in York for two decades.

She also threw herself into the local literature scene by becoming a founding member of the York Literature Festival committee.

But it was those early open mic events that led to the elevation of Stairwell Books (named for that nurturing Connecticut stairwell) to a fully formed independent publisher.

‘When we’d been running the York open mics for a couple of years we thought these guys are the best — holy cow, we have to bring out another book,’ says Rose. ‘So we brought out another anthology and opened it to poetry and prose.’

Having learned from the mistakes of their first, this one was a cut above and achieved national notice when it reached that year’s Purple Patch top ten of small press anthologies.

‘Then this author asked if we could bring out his novella,’ says Rose. ‘So we did and he sold 100 copies at his launch, and then from there we just kept going.’

The ongoing open mics and the quality anthologies and novellas gained the couple enough credibility to be asked to produce a young writers collection of short stories for Ryedale Book Festival in 2010. This was followed by a commission from the university’s Human Rights Centre for another anthology of youth writing for Amnesty International.

‘We got logos,’ said Rose. ‘The all-important blessing from someone else. We had the Amnesty International logo and the Make It York logo and that was a big deal.’

Along the way they had also picked up responsibility for running York’s Dream Catcher poetry periodical and now writers of some heft were coming to them.

‘We started attracting names like Alan Smith, who used to write for the Guardian,’ says Rose. ‘He’d been published elsewhere already and he liked what we’d done with other books so he asked if we’d bring out one of his novels.’

Acclaimed adult fiction author Rebecca Smith chose Stairwell to publish her first children’s novel, Shadow Cat Summer. Pauline Kirk, already published by Virago, came to Stairwell to publish her DI Ambrose crime fiction series. Celebrated northern poet Sarah Wimbush’s STRIKE collection reached the shortlist for the prestigious Forward Poetry prize. Multi-award winning children’s author Ali Sparkes asked to work with them for two of her passion projects, alongside her mainstream publishing with OUP and Harper Collins (her 100 Summers is Stairwell’s current bestseller).

‘It's because we offer that little concierge treatment,’ explains Rose. ‘You’re not going to be one of about a thousand people; I’m not going to be handing you over to another person. It means we work really hard but it does mean not a lot of details get lost and we stay on top of it. We’re really clear about what we need and we can impart that to the author and they can trust us with their story.’

The couple are also realistic about their role in an author’s career, as a stepping stone to greater things. Several of their writers are now agented and Stairwell is willing to relinquish each of them to a bigger publishing house when the time comes.

Alan puts it out there: ‘We know our limitations. We have the management skills to do it but we are on a shoestring. We do extremely well on a shoestring but we recognise that for somebody like Victoria L Humphreys, whose novel Other Way we published in 2025, we may have to let go. She now has an agent and is going somewhere. So is Gareth Woods, whose second brilliant horror story, To Those From Below, we’ve just published.

‘We’ve realised that a key part of what we can do is help to get talented writers the agent and the mainstream deal they deserve.’

Stairwell has also nurtured young editors through its internships, including one who has gone on to work for Oxford University Press. Alan and Rose are ambitious for more across the next decade.

Rose says: ‘I would love for one of our books to make the bestseller list. I would love to see that happen and I think we have a real chance with some of our up-and-coming authors that are starting to really gain traction.’

Alan contemplates the legacy. ‘I would not object to taking this boutique service as a subset to another big publisher, so that takes some of the production off our hands. We’d be happy, as an imprint, to provide our service with its particular character and style of nurturing.’

But for now Stairwell remains York’s small indie with a massive heart, promoting Yorkshire writers and bringing in authors from all around the world to appreciate the Yorkshire’s literary pulse.

‘We’ve come such a long way from that wooden stairwell,’ says Rose. ‘But there are many more steps we can climb.’

https://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/