The Bread & Roses Longlist 2015

This year, for the first time, we’re publishing a longlist, comprised of all eligible books submitted for the award. Thanks to all the authors and publishers who made a submission.

Title	Author	Publisher
Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution	Anne Alexander & Mostafa Bassiouny	Zed Books
The Second World War: A Marxist History	Chris Bambery	Pluto
England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381	Juliet Barker	Little Brown
Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs	JP Bean	Faber and Faber
A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life	Ward Blanton	Columbia
Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade our Lives	Joanna Bourke	Virago
The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good Business	John Browne	ebury
Deciphering Capital	Alex Callinicos	Bookmarks
Things Written Randomly in Doubt	Allan Cameron	Vagabond
Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s	Eddie Chambers	I.B. Tauris
Economics: The User’s Guide	Ha-Joon Chang	Pelican Introduction
Inequality and the 1%	Danny Dorling	Verso
Here We Stand: Women Changing the World	Helena Earnshaw & Angaharad Penrhyn Martin Jones	Honno
Land and Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History	Martin Empson	Bookmarks
Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence	James Foley & Pete Ramand	Pluto
Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline	Malu Halasa et al	Saqi
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man	Luke Harding	Faber and Faber / Guardian Books
Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us	John Hills	Policy press
The Magic Kingdom: Property, Monarchy, and the Maximum Republic	Dan Hind	Zero
Eleanor Marx: A Life	Rachel Holmes	Bloomsbury
Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion	Tansy E. Hoskins	Pluto
The Establishment: And how they get away with it	Owen Jones	Allen Lane
The Rich: From Slaves to Super-Yachts: A 2,000-Year History	John Kampfner	Little Brown
The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Love and Food in Iran	Jennifer Klinec	Virago
How To Speak Money	John Lanchester	Faber and Faber / Guardian Books
Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat	Philip Lymbery & Isabel Oakeshott	Bloomsbury
Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now	David Marquand	Allen Lane
What the **** is Normal?!	Francesca Martinez	ebury
Living with Dying: Finding Care and Compassion at the End of Life	Margaret McCartney	Pinter & Martin
Syria: From the Great War to Civil War	John McHugo	Saqi
Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else	James Meek	Verso
The New Urban Question	Andy Merrifield	Pluto
The Islamist Phoenix	Loretta Napoleoni	Policy Press
Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism	Benjamin Noys	Zero Books
Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK	Mary O’Hara	Policy Press
In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre	Lara Pawson	I.B. Tauris
Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution	Laurie Penny	Bloomsbury
Another Man’s War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain’s Forgotten African Army	Barnaby Phillips	One World
The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age	Alison Phipps	Polity Press
Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West	Agata Pyzik	Zero Books
Why Things Are Going To Get Worse: And Why We Should Be Glad	Michael Roscoe	World Changing
Women in Dark Times	Jacqueline Rose	Bloomsbury
Enemy on the Euphrates: The British Occupation of Iraq and the Great Arab Revolt 1914-1921	Ian Rutledge	Saqi
Why We Can’t Afford the Rich	Andrew Sayer	Policy Press
Turkish Awakening: A Personal Discovery of Modern Turkey	Alev Scott	Faber and Faber / Guardian Books
The Global Development Crisis	Ben Selwyn	Polity Press
Against Austerity: How we Can Fix the Crisis they Made	Richard Seymour	Pluto
Empire and Revolution: A Socialist history of the First World War	Dave Sherry	Bookmarks
In Place of Fear II: A Socialist Programme For An Independent Scotland	Jim Sillars	Vagabond
Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist International	Frances Stracey	Pluto
S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism	Richard Swift	World Changing
The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010	Selina Todd	John Murray
Feminism and Men	Nikki Van Der Gaag	Zed Books
Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism	Leandro Vergara-Camus	Zed Books
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider	Satnam Virdee	Palgrave Macmillan
Rules Without Rulers: The Possibilities and Limits of Anarchism	Matthew Wilson	Zero Books
King Mob: A Critical Hidden History	David Wise et al	Bread and Circuses Publishing

Submissions welcome for the 2015 Bread & Roses Award

• Submissions now open for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015
• Guest judges: Natalie Bennett, Anna Minton and Nina Power
• Award ceremony keynote event at the London Radical Bookfair, being held at the Bishopsgate Institute on 9^th May 
  

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB) is happy to announce that submissions are now being welcomed for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015. The Bread and Roses Award celebrates non-fiction which is

• informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns
• inspires, supports or reports on political and/or personal change
• accessible and readable by the interested reader
• relates to global, national, local or specialist areas of interest

Previous winners have included David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ (Melville House, 2012) and Hsiao-Hung Pai’s ‘Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants’ (Verso, 2013) and Joe Glenton’s ‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’ (Verso, 2014).

Guest judges  

Natalie Bennett, Nina Power and Anna Minton

This year’s guest judges are:

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green party. She edited Guardian Weekly between 2007 and March 2012. She’s a veteran blogger, with her home blog being Philobiblon, covering politics, history and books, and she was the founder of the Carnival of Feminists.

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the author of ‘One-Dimensional Woman’ (Zero Books 2009), co-editor of Alain Badiou’s ‘On Beckett’ (Clinamen 2002), and the author of several articles on European Philosophy, atomism, pedagogy, art and politics.

Anna Minton is a writer and journalist and the author of ‘Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City’, published by Penguin. She is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The Financial Times and is a Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. More info about her work can be found at www.annaminton.com

Award ceremony and prize money

The prize will be awarded at the London Radical Bookfair, to be held at the Bishopsgate Institute on Saturday 9^th May. This year’s London Radical Bookfair will  be taking place in tandem with the Alternative Press Fair.

 

There is one prize of £500 to the winning title, generously funded by the The General Federation of Trade Unions. The prize is run in conjunction with the ARB’s prize for progressive children’s writing, The Little Rebels Children’s Book Award.

Submissions

For full submissions criteria please visit Bread and Roses website:
https://breadandrosesprize.wordpress.com/faqs

Crucially, submitted books must have been published in 2014 and books must be written, or largely written by authors or editors normally living in the UK.

Joe Glenton’s ‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’ wins the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is proud to announce the winner of this year’s Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing: Joe Glenton’s ‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’ (Verso Books).

Joe Glenton’s books is a personal account of his experience of falling into the army,  passing through basic training, and subsequently being deployed to Afghanistan in 2006.  What he saw overseas left him disillusioned, and he returned manifesting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Refusing a second tour, he went AWOL and left the country, but returned voluntarily to fight his case, with the military accusing him of desertion. Despite being threatened with years in prison, he continued to speak out and won the support of many of his fellow soldiers.

Guest judge Nina Power said of the book “Joe Glenton’s gripping story of his political self-transformation, of everyday life in the army and of his trial is moving, honest and deeply passionate. His insights about the secretive hierarchies of army life and the pointless and brutal nature of the war in Afghanistan will confirm what many already suspect but should hear told in Glenton’s unique voice. This book is about a slow transformation, both personal and political: we hope that readers will see their own political journeys reflected in the bravery of Glenton’s stand against authority.”

The announcement was made by guest judges Jess McCabe, Seumas Milne and Nina Power in front of a packed audience at the London Radical Bookfair, which was held at Bishopsgate Institute in London. The prize was accepted on Joe’s behalf by Ben Griffin of Veterans for Peace, an organisation of which Joe is a member. Veterans for Peace is composed of veterans and non-veterans, working to promote alternatives to war.

Joe Glenton collecting his prize at Housmans Bookshop

Award Ceremony at London Radical Bookfair & Alternative Press Takeover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The winner of the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014  will be announced at the London Radical Bookfair & Alternative Press Takeover on Saturday 10 May at Bishopsgate Institute. This free event will include a programme of talks on all of the shortlisted titles, with speakers including Rob Evans, Ben Griffin, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Barry Kushner, Katharine Quarmby, Andrew Simms and Imogen Tyler. The announcement will be made by the guest judges of the prize: editor of The F-Word blog Jess McCabe, associate editor at The Guardian Seumas Milne, and writer, philosopher and activist Nina Power. For more information, please visit: londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com

The winner of the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award will also be announced at the ceremony, the shortlist for which can be found here.

 

 

 

The 2014 Shortlist is announced

We are delighted to announce the seven books which have made the shortlist for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014. The winner will be announced at the London Radical Bookfair, on Saturday 10th May 2014.

‘Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police’
by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
(Faber and Faber, 2013)

The gripping stories of a group of police spies – written by the award-winning investigative journalists who exposed the Mark Kennedy scandal – and the uncovering of forty years of state espionage.

This was an undercover operation so secret that some of our most senior police officers had no idea it existed. The job of the clandestine unit was to monitor British ‘subversives’ – environmental activists, anti-racist groups, animal rights campaigners. Police stole the identities of dead people to create fake passports, driving licences and bank accounts. They then went deep undercover for years, inventing whole new lives so that they could live incognito among the people they were spying on. They used sex, intimate relationships and drugs to build their credibility. They betrayed friends, deceived lovers, even fathered children. And their operations continue today.

‘Undercover’ reveals the truth about secret police operations – the emotional turmoil, the psychological challenges and the human cost of a lifetime of deception – and asks whether such tactics can ever be justified.

‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’
by Joe Glenton
(Verso, 2013)

When the War on Terror began, Joe Glenton signed up to serve his nation. He passed through basic training and deployed to Afghanistan in 2006. What he saw overseas left him disillusioned, and he returned manifesting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Refusing a second tour, he went AWOL and left the country, but returned voluntarily to fight his case, with the military accusing him of desertion. Despite being threatened with years in prison, he continued to speak out and won the support of many of his fellow soldiers.

Unsparingly honest and powerfully written, Glenton’s account of his personal war against an unjust occupation is the true story of an ordinary soldier standing up for his convictions, refusing to take part in a pointless conflict, and taking on the military establishment.

‘Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973′
by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
(Bloomsbury, 2013)

On 11 September 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile, Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president, was deposed in a violent coup d’état. Early that morning the phone lines to Allende’s office were cut, army officers loyal to the republic were arrested and shortly afterwards bombs from four British-made Hawker Hunter jets began slamming into the presidential palace. Allende refused to leave his post, making broadcasts to encourage the Chilean people until the last pro-government radio station was silenced. Later that morning he was found dead, with an AK-47 that had been a gift from Fidel Castro by his side.

The coup had been planned for months, even years before it actually happened. In fact, from the moment Allende’s electoral victory in 1970 became a possibility, business leaders in Chile, extreme right-wing groups, high-ranking officers in the Chilean military and the US administration and the CIA worked together to secure a prompt and dramatic end to his progressive social programme.

Why Allende seemed such a threat in the political and economic context of the time and how the coup was engineered is the story Oscar Guardiola-Rivera tells, drawing on a wide range of sources, including phone transcripts and documents released as recently as 2008. It is a radical retelling of a moment in history that even at the height of Cold War paranoia – a time when Henry Kissinger described Chile as ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica’ –shocked the world and which continues to resonate today. As the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the global protests at austerity measures introduced since the crash of 2008 show, the world is struggling to deal with the economic and political dilemmas Allende faced at the time.

‘Who Needs the Cuts? : Myths of the Economic Crisis’
by Barry Kushner and Saville Kushner
(Hesperus Press, 2013)

The Coalition Government in the United Kingdom, like other governments, is embarking on an unprecedented round of spending cuts. Talk of deficits, the National Debt, Quantitative Easing and other economic terminology is presented to the public as evidence that there is a vital need for some of the most drastic public-sector cuts we have ever faced.

In this highly-readbale book, Barry and Saville Kushner show clearly and convincingly that there is an alternative story that is not being told. There is a view of the economic events of the past five years that does not see the UK in debt crisis. It offers choice, differences of opinion, uncertainty and hope. It takes us on a different voyage, one beyond economics into politics and visions of society, our expectations and ambitions.

‘No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers’
by Katharine Quarmby
(Oneworld, 2013)

The shocking, poignant story of rejection, eviction and the fight for a home.

They are reviled. For centuries the Roma have wandered Europe; during the Holocaust half a million were killed. After World War II and during the Troubles, a wave of Irish Travellers moved to England to make a better, safer life. They found places to settle down – but then, as Occupy was taking over Wall Street and London, the vocal Dale Farm community in Essex was evicted from their land. Many did not leave quietly; they put up a legal and at times physical fight.

Award-winning journalist Katharine Quarmby takes us into the heat of the battle, following the Sheridan, McCarthy, Burton and Townsley families before and after the eviction, from Dale Farm to Meriden and other trouble spots. Based on exclusive access over the course of seven years and rich historical research, ‘No Place to Call Home’ is a stunning narrative of long-sought justice.

‘Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity’
by Andrew Simms
(Little, Brown, 2013)

Ever get the feeling that things are falling apart? You’re not alone. From bad banks to global warming, it can all look hopeless, but what if everything could turn out, well, even better than before? What if the only thing holding us back is a lack of imagination and a surplus of old orthodoxies?

It’s a topsy-turvy world in which a country can import the same amount of ice-cream, toilet paper and other goods as it exports, and where top bankers are paid millions for destroying economic value, while hospital cleaners create value many times their pay.

In fascinating and iconoclastic detail – on everything from the cash in your pocket to the food on our plates and the shape of our working lives – ‘Cancel the Apocalypse’ describes how the relentless race for economic growth is not always one worth winning, how excessive materialism has come at a terrible cost to our environment, and hasn’t even made us any happier in the process.

Simms believes passionately in the human capacity for change, and shows how the good life remains in our grasp. While global warming and financial meltdown might feel like modern day horsemen of the apocalypse, Simms shows how such end of the world scenarios offer us the chance for a new beginning.

‘Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain’
by Imogen Tyler
(Zed Books, 2013)

‘Revolting Subjects’ is a groundbreaking account of social abjection in contemporary Britain, exploring how particular groups are figured as ‘revolting’ and how they in turn ‘revolt’ against their subjectification. The book utilises a number of high-profile and in-depth case studies – including ‘chavs’, asylum seekers, Gypsies, anarchists and the disabled – to examine the ways in which individuals and groups negotiate restrictive, neoliberal ideologies of selfhood. In doing so, Tyler argues for a deeper psycho-social understanding of the role of aesthetic and representational forms in producing marginality, social exclusion and injustice, whilst also showing how it can be a creative resource for resistance.

Imaginative and original, ‘Revolting Subjects’ introduces a range of new insights into neoliberal societies, and will be essential reading for those concerned about widening inequalities, growing social unrest and social justice in the wider global context.

Guest judges for the Bread and Roses Award 2014

We’re delighted to announce the judges for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014.

Jess McCabe

Jess McCabe is editor-at-large of the F-Word blog, which continues to be highly influential in debates around contemporary feminism. The Guardian listed it as one of The World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs in 2008, and it continues week-on-week to chart in the Top 50 most visited political blogs in the UK.

Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He was the Guardian’s comment editor from 2001 to 2007 after working for the paper as a general reporter and labour editor. He has reported for the Guardian from the Middle East, eastern Europe, Russia, south Asia and Latin America.

He is the author of ‘The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners’ (Verso 2004) and ‘The Revenge of History: The Battle for the Twenty-first Century’ (Verso 2012).

Nina Power

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the author of ‘One-Dimensional Woman’ (Zero Books 2009), co-editor of Alain Badiou’s ‘On Beckett’ (Clinamen 2002), and the author of several articles on European Philosophy, atomism, pedagogy, art and politics.

Nina also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers’ Magazine. She is reviews editor for The Philosophers’ Magazine and also runs a film club (Kino Fist) in her spare time.

Hsiao-Hung Pai wins the Bread & Roses Award 2013

We’re delighted to announce that Hsiao-Hung Pai has won the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2013 for her book ‘Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants’ published by Verso. The announcement was made at the London Radical Bookfair at Conway Hall on Saturday 11th May. Due to ill health Hsia-Hung wasn’t able to attend, and so the award was acceptedon her behalf by Sarah Shin of Verso Books.

In making the announcement guest judge Nina Power described ‘Scattered Sand’ as “a vivid, intimate and highly-engaging picture of work in contemporary China. Pai’s book evidences compassion and passion in equal measure for the workers she talks to, and presents a highly convincing, if often depressing, portrait of rural to urban migration and economic exploitation. Pai’s account is an extremely worthy winner for Bread and Roses, and represents all that is important about radical, cutting-edge writing and publishing: reading Scattered Sand, one is simultaneously informed and impressed by the quality of the research, the humanity of the author and the devastating qualities of the situation she describes.”