About Alcemi
Alcemi started publishing in 2007 and is based in Aberystwyth, Wales. Whilst still very small (four novels a year), the team have big ambitions. These were partly realised in Alcemi’s first year, with the nomination of one of their first two novels, Salvage by Gee Williams, for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and its mass-market rights sale to Granta Books.
Alcemi is an imprint of Y Lolfa, best known on home ground for its Welsh-language fiction list. The company’s emphasis is on discovering and developing new talent, a skill editor Gwen Davies demonstrated while at Parthian, where her authors variously won or were shortlisted for prizes such as the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize (Rachel Trezise) and Betty Trask (Cynan Jones), or moved on to UK agencies or publishers (Tristan Hughes, Richard Gwyn).
The Guardian’s Nicholas Clee praised Liminal by Chris Keil as “Evocative… limpid and arrestingly vivid”; Jim Perrin called it “spare, precise, resonant... deft...”
JTB judge Colin Nicholson of the University of Edinburgh found Salvage “controlled... gifted... inventive and inspiring”, while The New Writer dubbed it “both a page-turner and one you want to savour... the least predictable novel I’ve read in a long time,” and New Welsh Review, “a complex and enthralling pyschological thriller.”
Twenty Thousand Saints by Fflur Dafydd is Guardian Hay Festival and Dylan Thomas Prize judge Peter Florence’s favourite current read: “The most compelling novel I’ve read in years; a love story, a thriller, and a profound meditation on language and identity.” Diva, the British magazine for lesbian readers, meanwhile, gave it a Four Star Review: “[Fflur] Dafydd is a magical writer and an acute observer of human nature.” And poet Owen Sheers thought the novel “Wry, engaging and perceptive... a beautifully rendered story of multiple forms of enquiry and excavation – spiritual, linguistic, filmic and sexual.”
Featured Titles
 | Twenty Thousand Saints by Fflur Dafydd "The most compelling novel I've read in years." - Peter Florence £9.99 |  | The Untogether by Jeb Loy Nichols A love story – intimate, warm, drily humorous - about the missing parts of our lives, and the things we fill them with. £7.99 |
Online Catalogue:
Contact Details:
w: http://www.alcemi.eu/alc-home.php?lang=ent: +44 (0)1970 832 304
Alcemi c/- Y Lolfa
Talybont
Aberystwyth
Wales
SY24 5AP
United Kingdom