Who are we?

Founded in 2020 by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, Hajar Press is an independent and proudly political publishing house run by and for people of colour.

Hajar was born out of our frustration with the publishing industry’s structural problems—institutional racism; commercial trend-following; Amazon’s domination; and the atomisation of readers and writers—as well as with the lack of internationalism and antiracist solidarity within many of our political movements.

We aim to build a community for people of colour, who are too often excluded from both these worlds: mainstream publishing and many conversations on the left. By writing on our own terms, we want to honour our histories, imagine new horizons and strengthen our collective power.

Who is Hajar?

Hajar, or Hagar, was the Egyptian handmaiden of Abraham’s wife Sarah and the mother of Ishmael. Abraham married Hajar so that she might bear him children, but after Sarah later gave birth to her own son, Isaac, she insisted that Hajar and Ishmael be banished into the desert.

Hajar represents the racialised people who perform the hidden labour that maintains society but are then disposed of and cast into the margins, their lives, stories and sacrifices forgotten or co-opted. In Arabic, the root h-j-r means to migrate.

What is our vision?

We publish books by writers of colour with original and transformative ways of seeing, imagining and remaking our world. We reject the lukewarm tokenism of ‘diversity’ to combat racism. Instead, we seek to address structural inequalities critically, using our voices to attack power―not to create the same elite with browner faces.

Community and solidarity are central to our vision. Our publications aim to challenge, connect and inspire our writers and readers to dare to dream of another world and build it together.

What are our values?

We want to live in a world without oppression and exploitation, in which people and our planet are put before profit and greed. We recognise that we are not equally endangered by structures of capitalism and white supremacy and that the term ‘people of colour’ itself has significant limits. We are not homogeneous and do not all face the same struggles but strive to stand in solidarity with each other, acknowledging our differences as well as our connectedness, with the common goal of full liberation. We believe that no one is free until we are all free.

What do we publish?

Hajar publishes ambitious and politically engaged fiction and nonfiction, including poetry and essays, by writers of colour. We are interested in writing that embodies how politics are lived and that conveys the relations between structures and personal experiences.

We want to make space for creative experimentation to blend forms and bend genres. We know that history can reside in stories passed down through generations and appreciate writing that reflects social memory and the spoken word. In short, we seek to publish books that move and teach us to see and think differently.