‘The War on Disabled People’ by Ellen Clifford is winner of the tenth Bread and Roses Award 2021

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is pleased to announce that Ellen Clifford is the winner of the tenth Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing for her book The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe (Zed/Bloomsbury, £12.99)

Ellen Clifford said “It is an absolute honour to win the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, following in the footsteps of great thinkers I have admired and who have used writing to try to make the world a better place. The Bread and Roses Award is the only award I have ever aspired to win because it validates exactly what I aspire to do – which is to use writing to explore ideas that can make the world a better place. I am grateful that the Award and that Radical Booksellers exist. I am also indebted to Zed Books for giving me the opportunity to write and for taking a chance on a first time author.”

Ellen Clifford is a disabled activist who has worked within the disability sector for over twenty years. She currently serves on the National Steering Group for Disabled People Against Cuts. This is her first book.

Karen Shook, former Books Editor at Times Higher Education magazine, on behalf of the judges, said: “The War on Disabled People is a hugely revelatory account of the one-quarter of UK society whose struggle for justice is literally a matter of life and death, and of the determined, defiant disabled activists whose resistance holds important lessons for everyone on the Left.”

She added that the shortlist comprised: “Powerful, wise and wonderfully informative books that not only shine unerring lights on cruelty, inequality and oppression, but also bear witness to humanity, resistance and hope.”

The full shortlist was: 
The War on Disabled People (Zed/Bloomsbury)
Stella Dadzie’s A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance (Verso)
Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News (Repeater)
Emma Griffin’s Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale)
Owen Hatherley’s Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London (Repeater)
Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto)
and Olivette Otele’s African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst).

The Bread and Roses Award is the only book award for radical non-fiction. Its little sister is the Little Rebels Award for children’s fiction. Both awards are organised by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. This award is for books published in 2020, written by writers living in Britain.

The judging and award ceremony was delayed due to COVID. The call out for books published in 2021 will be made soon.

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers comprises new and second hand bookshops, ranging from new shops (nine new members have joined within the last twelve months) through to bookshops that have been around for decades. As well as these awards the ARB organises the London Radical Bookfair, which will return in 2022.

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2021 Shortlist

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2021. Now in its tenth year, the Bread & Roses Award seeks to celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction.

The £500 prize will be awarded to the winner at a special event to be held at some point in early-October. The pandemic has forced us to delay this years award, and we are considering the possibility to hold an in-person award ceremony, however it may again take place online.

Our judges this year are Jane Elliot, Karen Shook, Tom Utterainer, and Jane Watts.

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

The Shortlist

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

Ellen Clifford – The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe [Zed/Bloomsbury]

Stella Dadzie – A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance [Verso]

Marcus Gilroy-Ware – After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News [Repeater]

Emma Griffin – Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy [Yale]

Owen Hatherley – Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London [Repeater]

Dan Hicks – The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution [Pluto]

Olivette Otele – African Europeans: An Untold History [Hurst]

Submissions welcome for the 2021 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 2021. 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)
‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe’ by Johny Pitts (Allen Lane, 2019)

Award ceremony and prize money

Due to continued Covid disruption we cannot say for certain when the announcement will be made, other than to say it will be in the summer of 2021.

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 this page on the Bread and Roses website:
https://breadandrosesprize.wordpress.com/faqs

Crucially, submitted books must have been published in 2020 and books must be written, or largely written by authors or editors normally living in the UK.

The Bread and Roses Award 2020 online ceremony

On September 23rd 2020 the ninth Bread and Roses Award ceremony was held online. The six shortlisted authors spoke eloquently about their books, and Helena Earnshaw, representing the judges, spoke about the judging process, the shortlisted books, and announced the winner. You can watch the video of the event here – the winner’s speech is not to be missed!

‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe’ by Johny Pitts Winner of the Bread & Roses Award 2020

Guest judge Helena Earnshaw announcing the winner

Johny Pitts receiving the award virtually

‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe’ by Johny Pitts
wins the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020

The Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020 has been awarded to ‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe’ by Johny Pitts, published by Allen Lane.

The award is given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB) and was announced by guest judges, Helena Earnshaw, Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and Hsiao-Hung Pai, themselves previous winners of the award, at an online ceremony.

The Bread and Roses Award is a book prize with a difference: presented by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, and without the backing of corporate sponsors, the award seeks to recognise and celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction. An award of £500 is made to the winning author.

Now in its eighth year, the first book to win the award was ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’, written by the anthropologist and activists David Graeber, who sadly died earlier this month, and whose memory and work was honoured at the award ceremony.

Quote from Johny Pitts:

“That Afropean has been embraced by booksellers and writers with histories of resistance to injustice and intolerance is immensely encouraging. My book stands proudly on the shoulders of an intellectual legacy they have long supported and enriched.  To share the spotlight with such a vigorous and urgent shortlist has been equally rewarding. My gratitude to all involved for continuing to champion our work in such uncertain times”.

Quotes from Guest Judges regarding ‘Afropean’.

“An extremely readable and richly-textured blend of travel, history and politics. Johny Pitts views the world with a sharp, unflinching, yet human gaze – there is positivity and warmth in abundance. This is not a book to be rushed, but to be savoured.” – Helena Earnshaw

“Afropean is a unique political documentary about Black experience in Europe. Political writing about the continent’s racialised peoples is much needed and Afropean does it brilliantly by getting up close and personal.”  – Hsiao Hung-Pai

“This is a multi-layered, lyrical book, combining travel writing with politics, history, memoir, and on-the-ground documentary journalism. Johny Pitts challenges us to view Europe through a different lens. Original, moving and deeply engaging, Afropean is a hugely impressive achievement and deserves the widest possible readership.”  – Angharad Penrhyn Jones

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers

The Bread and Roses prize is awarded by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB) which helps to support and promote the work of Britain’s radical and progressive booksellers.

Bread & Roses Award 2020 Online Award Ceremony

Please join us for this year’s Bread & Roses Award 2020 Online Award Ceremony, taking place at 7pm on Wednesday 23rd September. The event is free; all you have to do take part in this live streamed event is register by emailing events@fiveleaves.co.uk and you will be sent the necessary link.

Taking part in the ceremony and introducing their books will be shortlisted authors:
Becky Alexis-Martin, Kate Charlesworth, Priyamvada Gopal, Ruth Kinna, Johny Pitts and senior editor at Verso Leo Hollis speaking on behalf of Frances Ryan.

They will be joined by guest judges, the previous Bread & Roses winners :Helena Earnshaw, Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and Hsiao-Hung Pai.

The event will be hosted by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Bookshop.

The Bread and Roses Award is a book prize with a difference: presented by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, and without the backing of corporate sponsors, the award seeks to recognise and celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction. An award of £500 will be made to the winning author.

The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020 Shortlist

The Alliance of Radical Booksellers is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2020. Now in its ninth year, the Bread & Roses Award seeks to celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction.

The £500 prize will be awarded to the winner at a special event to be held at some point in mid-September. The pandemic has forced us to delay this years award, and we are holding out for the possibility to hold an in-person award ceremony, however if this proves impossible the award ceremony will take place on line.

Our guest judges this year are all previous winners of the Bread & Roses award: Helena Earnshaw, Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and Hsiao-Hung Pai.

Please do also visit the website of our sister book prize, The Little Rebel’s Children’s Book Award, who will be announcing their shortlist for the best books published in the UK for readers aged 0-12 imminently.

The Shortlist

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

‘Afropean: Notes from Black Europe’ by Johny Pitts (Allen Lane)

‘Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People’ by Frances Ryan (Verso)

‘Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima’ by Becky Alexis-Martin (Pluto Press)

‘The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism’ by Ruth Kinna (Pelican)



‘Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent’ by Priyamvada Gopal (Verso)

‘Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide. A graphic guide to lesbian and queer history 1950-2020’ by Kate Charlesworth (Myriad Editions)

The Bread and Roses Submission List 2020

We are very happy to announce here the books submitted for the 2020 award. To qualify, all titles must fit the award’s political requirements, and have been published in 2019 by an author who is primarily resident in the UK.

Due to uncertainties created by the Covid-19 pandemic the dates of the shortlist and award ceremony are currently being rescheduled.

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

Title	Author	Publisher
A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism	David Swift	Zero
A Seat at the Table: Interviews with Women on the Frontline	Amy Raphael	Virago
A Virtue of Disobedience	Asim Qureshi	Unbound
Afropean: Notes from Black Europe	Johny Pitts	Allen Lane
All Together Now?: One Man’s Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England	Mike Carter	Guardian / Faber
Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus	Sandi Toksvig	Virago
Billionaires	Darryl Cunningham	Myriad
BOSH! How to Live Vegan	Henry Firth and Ian Theasby	HQ
Brave New Words	Susheila Nasta (Editor)	Myriad
Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being	Paul Mason	Allen Lane
Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War	Duncan White	Little Brown
Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers	Kit De Waal (Editor)	Unbound
Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People	Frances Ryan	Verso
Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima	Becky Alexis-Martin	Pluto Press
Don’t Touch my Hair	Emma Dabiri	Allen Lane
Equal: How We Fix the Gender Pay Gap	Carrie Gracie	Virago
Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History	Richard J Evans	Little Brown
Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires	James Walvin	Robinson
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want	Rob Hopkins	Chelsea Green
Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto	Aaron Bastani	Verso
Give Birth Like a Feminist	Milli Hill	HQ
The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism	Ruth Kinna	Pelican
Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats	Maya Goodfellow	Verso
How to be Autistic	Charlotte Amelia Poe	Myriad
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent	Priyamvada Gopal	Verso
It’s About Bloody Time. Period.	Emma Barnett	HQ
Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel	Gardner Thompson	Saqi
Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India	K.S. Komireddi	Hurst
Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World	Christopher Wylie	Profile
Nicosia Beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City	Alev Adil et al (Editors)	Saqi
One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA	Daniel Finn	Verso
Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham	Jon Bloomfield	Unbound
Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth	Guy Standing	Pelican
The Prison Doctor	Amanda Brown	HQ
Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party	David Kogan	Bloomsbury
Rife: Twenty-One Stories from Britain’s Youth	Nikesh Shukla and Sammy Jones (Editors)	Unbound
Roaring Girls: The Forgotten Feminists of British History	Holly Kyte	HQ
Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide – A graphic guide to lesbian and queer history 1950-2020	Kate Charlesworth	Myriad
Sex, Power, Money	Sara Pascoe	Faber
Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen	Sabrina Mahfouz (Editor)	Westbourne Press
Stage Invasion: Poetry and the Spoken Word Renaissance	Peter Bearder	Out-Spoken
Surrender	Joanna Pocock	Fitzcarraldo
This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health	Nathan Filer	Faber
This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality	Peter Pomerantsev	Faber
Tunnel Vision	Kevin Beathnach	Faber
We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post War Britain	Daniel Sonabend	Verso
What We’re Told Not to Talk About (But We’re Going to Anyway): Women’s Voices from East London to Ethiopia	Nimko Ali	Penguin Viking
Where Are the Women?: A Guide To An Imagined Scotland	Sara Sheridan	Historic Environment Scotland
The Windrush BetrayalThe Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment	Amelia Gentleman	Guardian / Faber
Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can’t Have It All in a Free Market Economy	Vicky Pryce	Hurst

 

 

 

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.

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.”