Wolf
Magazine your guide to poetry magazines, fashion magazines and magazine covers

The Frogmore Papers, a small poetry magazine, told would-be contributors on the day its page was checked that poems for its March issue could be sent between the 1st and 31st of the month, and that anything arriving outside the window would be returned. That one line is why Wolf Magazine keeps a dated directory of UK poetry magazines instead of a list of favourites. Dates go stale; a reader needs to know how stale.

The rest of this page is a map of what the site holds and how it was made: poetry magazines first, then fashion magazines, then covers, then the working method, then a short list of the other guides. Read in order or jump. Nothing here depends on what came before.

Poetry magazines and the UK scene

The British poetry press is a crowded, underpaid and astonishingly durable trade. The Poetry Society’s The Poetry Review has been going since January 1912. Stand began in 1952, PN Review in 1973, Poetry London in 1988. Alongside them sit pamphlet-sized quarterlies, web-only titles and magazines that appear when the editor has the money. Anyone who wants to understand these poetry magazines has to accept that the line between a magazine, a small press and a one-person hobby is thin and moves.

The directory at UK poetry magazines covers thirty-one titles, edited in England, Scotland and Wales, and each row is built from the publisher’s own submissions page and nothing else. No row was filled in from memory or from a roundup elsewhere. Where a page gave no fee, the table says unclear, not free, because silence is not a promise. Where a window date was vague, the entry carries a lower confidence mark and says so. It is a directory, not a ranking: it will not tell a poet that one magazine is better than another, only what each says about itself on the day.

Poets ask two questions of any list, and the directory answers both as best it can. Is the magazine open now? And will it cost anything? On 1 October 2026 Orbis, The London Magazine and Tears in the Fence described themselves as open, while Acumen was closed with a promise of notice before the next window. Fees are rarer than most people assume. The few that charge, such as Magma and Tears in the Fence, ask for a small sum from non-subscribers. Payment to contributors, where stated, runs from copies only to a few tens of pounds a poem. Poetry London states £35.

A few habits show up across the whole list and are worth knowing before reading a single row. Editors who say no simultaneous submissions mean it, and Acumen, Gutter, Stand and The Poetry Review are among those that do. Response times are given by only a minority: Ink Sweat & Tears and The North state ten to twelve weeks, The Dark Horse nearer twenty. Where a page says nothing, the sensible assumption is months. Translation has one dedicated title, Modern Poetry in Translation, founded in 1965, which takes only translated work.

Competitions follow different rules from magazines, and they get their own page. The competitions calendar lists twenty prizes with deadlines on or after the day of checking, with entry fee, first prize and limits as each organiser states them. It also notes where entry is free. The Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, for instance, closed on 1 October itself, a reminder that a calendar is only useful if somebody reads it before the date.

Records from the Literary Desk

The Literary Desk also holds record pages from The Wolf, a poetry magazine edited by James Byrne whose issues ran to at least number 35. These are summaries with dates, not reprints, and they are the best reason to browse the desk rather than search it. Three are worth reading before anything else.

The first is the Michael Donaghy interview in the very first issue. Nicholas Cobic asks about London poetry since Donaghy’s arrival in 1985, and about his decision to leave a Forward Prize judging panel. Several answers are deliberately flippant. It reads like a man enjoying himself in public, which is rarer than it should be.

The second is Dante Micheaux’s conversation with Derek Walcott in issue 21, conducted while White Egrets was still forthcoming. That collection appeared in 2010 and took the T. S. Eliot Prize the following year. Walcott talks about Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney as friends without jealousy, and about no longer needing the approval of New York, London or Paris.

The third is the Fady Joudah and Marilyn Hacker exchange in issue 25, an argument for calling metrical verse by its own name instead of “received form”. Poets who think formal writing is a closed shop could start there. A fourth, if there is time: the seven-publisher round table in issue 17, with Neil Astley of Bloodaxe and Michael Schmidt of Carcanet answering the same questions, usually in opposite directions.

Poets who want to read a magazine before sending to it can use the National Poetry Library on the fifth level of the Royal Festival Hall, where membership is free. Most editors say, in various tones, that they can tell who has done so.

Fashion magazines: names, editions and how the titles differ

The fashion side of the site starts from a plain fact: fashion magazines are not one kind of publication. A title built on photography and advertising, a title built on criticism, a title built on trade news and a title built on youth culture can sit on one newsstand and have almost nothing in common except the word fashion.

Think of three shelves. One holds the monthly glossies, where photography, advertising and an editor’s name carry the brand. Another holds the youth and style titles, which tend to be born from one person’s taste and to live or die with it. A third holds the trade press, written for buyers and designers more than for shoppers. A reader who picks up the wrong shelf will think the magazine is bad when it is merely addressed to someone else.

The guide to the best fashion magazines sorts them by what they do for a reader, with names, country and a founding year only where one can be confirmed. It does not pick a winner. It will say, where the evidence leans, that a certain kind of reader is better served by one kind of title, and then say why.

Vogue gets a guide of its own, and deserves one. Vogue began in New York on 17 December 1892 as a weekly newspaper, sold at ten cents, long before it was the glossy monthly that readers now picture. British Vogue followed in 1916 as its first international edition. The Vogue magazine guide sets out that edition history, the launches and the later changes, and does so edition by edition, because “Vogue” means something quite different in London, Paris and Mexico City.

Readers who know The Face as a British youth magazine will want a different kind of guide again. Nick Logan founded it in 1980, and its July 1990 issue, with a sixteen-year-old Kate Moss on the cover, is the one most often cited when people talk about how a magazine can make a name rather than just report one. That is a claim about influence, not a measurement, and the guides label it as such.

Magazine covers: how one is built and which ones last

Open any newsagent’s rack and the ranks of covers repeat themselves: a face, a masthead across the top, a clutch of lines down one side. The repetition is deliberate. Shoppers learn the pattern and read the exceptions as signals, and a title that breaks its own format, tells the reader something before a word is read.

A cover has about as long as a glance. In that time it has to say what the magazine is, which issue this is, how much it costs and why the reader should open it. Everything on a cover is there for one of those four jobs, and the guide to covers takes the masthead, the date and issue line, the price, the barcode and the cover lines one at a time, so a reader can see where the compromise sits.

The harder question is why some magazine covers are remembered and most are not. The page on famous magazine covers tries to answer by looking at particular issues instead of generalising. It describes covers in words: the issue, the date, the credit where known, what the cover shows and what made it travel. There are no reproductions, because copyright in the artwork belongs to the publishers and photographers and describing the picture is enough to explain the argument.

One date shows how technical change shaped covers. According to the standard reference accounts, Vogue’s first colour photograph on its cover, by Edward Steichen, ran in July 1932, and it showed a woman swimmer holding a beach ball. Before photography took over, covers were drawings and paintings, and the habit of treating a cover as a small poster stayed long after the need had gone.

Position matters too. Magazines sold by subscription can afford a quiet cover, because the reader has already paid. Magazines sold from a shelf cannot, and the barcode, price and issue line that look like clutter are part of what lets a retailer shelve and scan the copy. Neither kind of cover is neutral about money, and the guide says where the commerce shows.

Poetry magazines have covers too, and they are a useful counter-example. Many carry no cover lines at all, only a title, an issue number and a picture. That is a choice as definite as a fashion title’s wall of celebrity names, and the covers guide treats it as one.

How Wolf Magazine checks facts, and what it does not do

Wolf Magazine works from primary sources wherever it can: the publisher’s own page, the British Library, a regulator’s register, a library catalogue, and for dates a reference such as Wikipedia, cited and opened. A name, a date, a number or a prize goes in only if it was seen on a page that can be named. Where two sources disagree, the guide says that they do and gives both, as it does for the oldest title of all (see below).

Take the founding years quoted on this page. The Poetry Review’s January 1912 start, the National Poetry Library’s free membership and Walcott’s prize each come from a reference page linked where the fact appears. Each can be traced in a minute, and a reader who finds a different date should believe the source before the guide.

Three rules follow from that. Directory entries carry the date they were checked. Figures that were not confirmed are left out, not rounded into plausibility. And no magazine is scored. A score would invite a comparison between a quarterly of verse and a weekly of fashion that no one could defend, and the people who read the guides are usually asking something more specific.

Habit matters as much as sources. Every figure is read twice, once when written and once against the page it came from, and anything that rests on a single secondary source is flagged as such in the text. Wolf Magazine would rather print “not stated” than a round number that sounds right. Readers will notice the effect in the directory, where gaps are visible and left as gaps.

There are limits, which are better stated than discovered. The guides do not predict which magazine will survive; The Face, which closed in 2004, returned in 2019 and has been reported as ceasing again in 2026, is a fair warning against confidence. They do not review individual issues in the manner of a newsstand column. They do not offer legal advice on rights and contracts, only point to where the terms are written. And they do not take payment to change an entry. If a detail is wrong, say so, and the source on the page will show how it got there.

More guides on the shelf

The magazines hub lists everything, but a few pages repay a separate visit. The oldest magazine page deals with the argument over firsts: the Journal des sçavans appeared on 5 January 1665 and the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in March that year (the Journal des sçavans is usually given the two-month lead), so the answer depends entirely on whether a learned journal counts as a magazine. The types of journals guide takes that boundary further.

For subject titles there is magazines about art, magazines about politics and the history of National Geographic. Readers who would sooner make a magazine than read one can start with publishing your own magazine. The Literary Desk is the way back into the poetry records.

Wolf Magazine was written for the reader who still likes paper, or likes knowing what the paper version looked like: how a title announces itself, when it began, who edits it and what it costs to send it a poem. A reader with a particular question, such as which fashion magazines have a British edition or which magazine covers carry a famous credit line, can go straight to the guide that holds it.

Open the directory first if there is only time for one page. It is the part of the site most likely to be useful by the end of the week, and the part most likely to have changed by the end of the year.