Submissions welcome for the 2020 Bread & Roses Award

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 2020. 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, 2011),
Hsiao-Hung Pai’s ‘Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants’ (Verso, 2012),
Joe Glenton’s ‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’ (Verso, 2013)
‘Here We Stand: Women Changing The World’, edited by Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones (Honno Press, 2014)
‘The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh’ by Jeremy Seabrook  (Hurst, 2015)
‘The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power’ by Alex Nunns (OR Books, 2016)
Joint winners ‘Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands’ by Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz (Allen Lane 2017) and ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Bloomsbury 2017).
‘Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right’ by Liz Fekete (Verso, 2018)

Award ceremony and prize money

The award will be awarded at the the Bread & Roses Theatre Space, Kings Cross, London, to be held  in June 2020 (precise date tbc). 

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

Submissions

PLEASE NOTE A RECENT CHANGE OF ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THIS YEAR’S AWARD.

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

Crucially, submitted books must have been published in 2019 and books must be written, or largely written by authors or editors normally living in the UK.

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Winners of the Bread & Roses Award 2019 announced

‘Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right’ by Liz Fekete (Verso) winner of the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2019

The award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB), and in a change to previous years was judged solely by ARB bookshop staff and close supporters.

Liz Fekete (left) receiving her award from judge Jane Watts (Five Leaves Bookshop

The award and prize money was given at an event held at the Bread & Roses Theater space at the National Union of Journalists headquarters in London.

Liz Fekete responded to the news by saying: “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to receive the Bread and Roses award.  That Europe’s Fault Lines was singled out by the ARB –stalwarts  who keep faith with  radical ideas  in difficult times –  means so  much to me!  This book  was based on ten years research at the Institute of Race Relations. Thanks to all my colleagues on the IRR/Race & Class collective, thanks to Verso, thanks to the judges and everyone involved in putting together last night’s marvelous event.”

Judge Tom Unterrainer had this to say of the winning book:
“Liz Fekete’s Europe’s Fault Lines is the product of year’s of documentation, analysis and activism in the cause of anti-racism and anti-fascism. In many ways, the book could be viewed as a dispatch from the trenches of a continent-wide fight against a resurgent far-right but it is also more than that. Liz combines an account of the horrors unfolding before us with a historically and materially rooted analysis of the intersections between movements, states and an increasingly authoritarian organisation of the economy and society. It is essential reading for all of us who worry over what might happen next and who are determined to resist.”

Judge Jane Watts reflected on the process:
“Selecting the winner of a ‘radical’ book prize from a list of submissions which could encompass so many different themes is understandably difficult. Nevertheless this year, Liz Fekete’s important book did stand out as a necessary book for these difficult times. The rise of the far right across Europe (and elsewhere) needs our constant attention and action.

Europe’s Fault Lines is a well researched  contribution, providing evidence to back up the activism that the left must undertake. It was not surprising to find two books about the far right on our shortlist, but it was perhaps more of a surprise not to see far more submissions focusing on climate change and environmental activism.  I was of course pleased to see two feminist books on the shortlist, both offering new perspectives in contested areas and adding to the sum of our understanding.”

Bread & Roses Trustee Nik Gorecki adds: “Its been another very strong shortlist this year, not to mention the quality within the longer list of submissions. The dilemma of choosing a winner has been as hard as ever. I think we have to consider ourselves lucky to see the state of radical and progressive publishing in such good health. I also get the impression that ideas and attitudes of the Left that were once seen as extreme are increasingly becoming common sense. Hopefully that trend will continue, and publishing has a crucial role in that process.”

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2019 Shortlist

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2019. Now in its eighth year, the Bread & Roses Award seeks to celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction.

In a change to previous years, the 2019 award is being facilitated, adjudicated and funded solely by Alliance of Radical Booksellers members. The £500 prize will be awarded to the winner at a special event to be held at the Bread & Roses Theatre, King’s Cross, on Tuesday 11th June, 2019.

Please do also visit the website of our sister book prize, The Little Rebel’s Children’s Book Award, to view the recently announced shortlist of the best books published in the UK for readers aged 0-12.

Clicking on the publisher link alongside each title will take you to a relevant page with more information about each title.

The Shortlist

‘Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire’ by Akala (Two Roads)

‘Can We All Be Feminists?: Seventeen writers on intersectionality, identity and finding the right way forward for feminism’ edited by June Eric-Udorie (Virago)

‘Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right’ by Liz Fekete (Verso)

‘Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights by Juno Mac and Molly Smith (Verso)

‘Lights In The Distance:  Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe’ by Daniel Trilling (Picador)

‘Alt Right: From 4chan to the White House’ by Mike Wendling (Pluto Press)

The Bread and Roses Submission List 2019

We are very happy to announce here the books submitted for the 2019 award. To qualify, all titles must fit the award’s political requirements, and have been published in 2018 by an author who is primarily resident in the UK.

The Shortlist will be announced very soon, and the award ceremony will be taking place at the Bread &  Roses Theatre space, King’s Cross, on Tuesday 11th June 2019. More information on that to come.

Our thanks to all publishers and authors who have submitted titles.
The Submission List is presented here in alphabetical order, by book title.

A New Jerusalem	Benjamin Dickinson	9781780264424	New Internationalist
A Party With Socialists In It: A History of the Labour Left	Simon Hannah	9780745337470	Pluto Press
A Radical History of the World	Neil Faulkner	9780745338040	Pluto Press
A Woman Lived Here: Alternative Blue Plaques	Allison Vale	9781472140074	Little Brown
A Writer Of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger	Joshua Sperling	9781786637420	Verso
Against Creativity	Oli Mould	9781786636492	Verso
Alt. Right	Mike Wendling	9780745337456	Pluto Press
Bad Girls	Caitlin Davies	9781473647749	John Murray
Bullshit Jobs	David Graeber	9780241263884	Allen Lane
Burning Country	Robin Yassin-Kassab & Leila Al-Shami	9780745337821	Pluto Press
Burning Up	Simon Pirani	9780745335612	Pluto Press
Can We All Be Feminists?	June Eric-Udorie (Ed.)	9780349009872	Virago
Class Matters	Charles Umney	9780745337081	Pluto Press
Cracks In The Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine / Israel	Ben White	9780745337616	Pluto Press
Decolonising University	Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, Kerem Nişancıoğlu (Eds)	9780745338200	Pluto Press
England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities	Mike Wayne	9780745399331	Pluto Press
Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters With Syrian Refugees	Olivier Kugler	9781912408122	Myriad
Europe’s Fault Lines	Liz Fekete	9781784787226	Verso
Fallout: A Journey Through The Nuclear Age	Fred Pearce	9781846276255	Portabello
For A Left Populism	Chantal Mouffe	9781786637550	Verso
Four Feet Under	Tamsen Courtney	9781783525720	Unbound
Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed By Tech	Jamie Suskind	9780198825616	Oxford U.P.
Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed Politics	Steve Howell	9781786155863	Accent Press
Guilty Feminist, The	Deborah Frances-White	9780349010144	Virago
Hara Hotel	Teresa Thornhill	9781786635198	Verso
How The World Thinks: A Global History Of Philosophy	Julian Baggini	9781783782284	Granta
Inner Level, The	Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett	9781846147418	Allen Lane
John Maclean: Hero Of Red Clydeside	Henry Bell	9780745338385	Pluto Press
K-Punk	Mark Fisher	9781912248285	Repeater
Kill All The Gentlemen	Martin Empson	9781910885697	Bookmarks
Lee Lozano: Not Working	Jo Applin	9780300223279	Yale U.P.
Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service	Melissa Benn	9781788732208	Verso
Lights In The Distance	Daniel Trilling	9781509815616	Picador
Marx and Marxism	Gregory Claeys	9780141983486	Pelican
National Populism: The Revolt Against Democracy	Roger Eatwell & Matthew Goodwin	9780241312001	Pelican
Natives	Akala	9781473661219	Two Roads
Never Again: Rock Against Racism	David Renton	9781138502710	Taylor & Francis
Night March	Alpa Shah	9781849049900	Hurst
Nine Pints: Through the Miysterious, Miraculous World Of Blood	Rose George	9781846276125	Portabello
Picture Book Professors	Melissa M. Terras	9781108438452	Cambridge Elements
Propaganda Blitz	David Edwards & David Cromwell (Eds)	9780745338118	Pluto Press
Radical Help	Hilary Cottham	9780349009070	Virago
Radical Sacrifice	Terry Eagleton	9780300233353	Yale U.P.
Revolting Prostitutes	Juno Mac & Molly Smith	9781786633606	Verso
Talking To North Korea	Glyn Ford	9780745337852	Pluto Press
The Ebb of the Pink Tide: The Decline of the Left in Latin America	Mike Gonzalez	9780745399966	Pluto Press
The Human Planet	Simon L. Lewis & Mark A. Maslin	9780241280881	Pelican
The Inking Woman	Nicola Streeten & Cath Tate	9780995590083	Myriad
The Memory We Could Be	Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik	9781780264400	New Internationalist
To Provide All People	Owen Sheers	9780571348077	Faber
Trans Britain	Christine Burns (Ed.)	9781783524716	Unbound
Trans Europe Express	Owen Hatherley	9780141988320	Allen Lane
When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace	Ed Vulliamy	9781783783366	Granta

 

Submissions welcome for the 2019 Bread & Roses Award

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 2019. 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, 2011),
Hsiao-Hung Pai’s ‘Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants’ (Verso, 2012),
Joe Glenton’s ‘Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror’ (Verso, 2013)
‘Here We Stand: Women Changing The World’, edited by Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones (Honno Press, 2014)
‘The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh’ by Jeremy Seabrook  (Hurst, 2015)
‘The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power’ by Alex Nunns (OR Books, 2016)
Joint winners ‘Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands’ by Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz (Allen Lane 2017) and ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Bloomsbury 2017).

Award ceremony and prize money

The award will be awarded at the London Radical Bookfair, to be held  in June 2019 (precise date tbc). This 2019 London Radical Bookfair will  be taking place at Goldsmiths University.

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

Submissions

PLEASE NOTE A NEW MAILING ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THIS YEAR’S AWARD.

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

Crucially, submitted books must have been published in 2018 and books must be written, or largely written by authors or editors normally living in the UK.

Joint winners of the Bread & Roses Award 2018 announced

‘Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands’ by Stuart Hall (with Bill Schwarz)
and
‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ by Reni Eddo-Lodge
joint winners of the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2018

In a first for the Bread & Roses Award, the guest judges have given this year’s prize to two books, ‘Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands’ by Stuart Hall (with Bill Schwarz) and ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ by Reni Eddo-Lodge.

The award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB) and was presented to Bill Schwarz  by guest judge Joan Anim-Addo, at the London Radical Bookfair on Saturday 2nd June.

Bread & Roses Award Trustee, Nik Gorecki, on the sharing of the award.“The decision to share the award was predicated on the notion that these two exceptional books compliment one another so well, offering two different approaches and levels of insight into the inter-relational dynamics of racism.

Stuart Hall drew on a lifetime of experience and academic learning to offer a subtle yet complex perspective on empire, colonialism and identity. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s direct writing style captures the immediacy of political discourse in the social media age, and unflinchingly turns a spotlight on the too-often unacknowledged manifestations of racism across society. The two books together provide readers with a rich inter-generational and inter-sectional narrative of black British experience and analysis.”

Guest judge Katharine Quarmby on ‘Familiar Stranger’

“Familiar Stranger is an outstanding memoir which, with considerable subtlety, marries together memoir with politics, providing readers with a brilliant analysis of the many discontents of colonialism. This posthumous account, written with Bill Schwarz, gave a beautiful sense of point and counterpoint throughout the book.

The chapters on Hall’s childhood were particularly strong in delineating the many complexities of race and class as identity is created – and the sections on the Windrush generation and their descendants heartbreakingly poignant, in the light of what is happening now.There can be no better guide to the intricacies of navigating British identities after the fall of empire than this book.”

Guest judge Joan Anim-Addo on ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’

“Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race is a wonderful and timely book that dares to speak honestly to the contemporary moment in Britain, one that is increasingly characterised by young people, black and white, wanting to understand as fully as they can the society in which they live. While that society is of course multi-racial, the quality of life for too many people continues to be affected by the reality of race, or more accurately, racialised thinking in its varied guises.

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race, in addressing – so unflinchingly – this concern with race, stands within a radical, though largely hidden tradition of black writing in Britain. Where, for example, Robert Wedderburn had travelled with his Axe Laid to the Root in the nineteenth century and Linton Kwesi Johnson, notably with his Inglan is a Bitch in the twentieth century, Reni Eddo-Lodge, a young, home-grown, Black British woman of the twenty-first century now stands. Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race must rightly be recognised for its radical work.

Kudos, too, to its publisher and the nameless person who quietly in the background refused to consent to the usual gatekeepers and fought for this book to be published. This book is direct. It is clear. It makes no excuses about its political positioning – black, intersectional, feminist – and it brings us all that much closer to the very necessary dialogue that we really need to have about race and that we must no longer sidestep.”

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2018 Shortlist

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2018. Now in its seventh year, the Bread & Roses Award seeks to celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction.

The winner will be announced by guest judges Joan Anim-Addo, Katherine Quarmby and Owen Hatherley at a ceremony at the London Radical Bookfair on Saturday 2nd June 2018. Also announced at this ceremony will be the ARB’s children’s prize, The Little Rebel’s Children’s Book Award, the shortlist for which will be revealed on Thursday 3rd May.

The Shortlist

‘Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race’
Reni Eddo-Lodge [Bloomsbury Circus]

‘Border: A Journey To The Edge Of Europe’
Kapka Kassabova [Granta]

‘Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands’
Stuart Hall (w. Bill Schwarz) [Penguin Allen Lane]

‘Nasty Women’
Heather McDaid (Editor), Laura Jones (Editor) [404INK]

‘The Violence of Austerity’
Vickie Cooper, David Whyte (editors) [Pluto Press]

‘Sound System: The Political Power of Music’
Dave Randall [Pluto Press]

Award ceremony

The award ceremony for the award is taking place at the London Radical Bookfair on Saturday 2nd June, hosted this year at Goldsmiths University, London. The winner of the award will receive a cheque for £500, funded by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers

Provisional details about this year’s bookfair can be found at: https://londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com

Our guest judges

Katharine Quarmby is an award winning author and journalist, working in both TV and print journalism. Amongst her work she was assistant producer on Panorama, working on many controversial political and foreign films, and has the rare honour of being the only person to be shortlisted for both of the ARB’s book prizes: the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Fiction, for her book No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers (One World, 2013) and the Little Rebels Children’s Book Award Ossiri and the Bala Mengro, (Child’s Play International, with Richard O’Neill, 2016)

Owen Hatherley is a writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture. His most recent books include A New Kind of Bleak (Verso, 2012), Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane, 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016)

Professor Joan Anim-Addo has been the Director of the then Centre for Caribbean Studies at Goldmsiths, and is currently convenor for the undergraduate option: Caribbean Women’s Writing and also the Pathway ‘Literature of the Caribbean and its Diasporas’ within the MA Comparative Literary Studies programme.