About Five Leaves

We had to write this for another purpose, but in case you wondered, here's 400 words describing what we do.

Five Leaves Publications (www.fiveleaves.co.uk) is a small publishing house in Nottingham, active since 1996, with roots in the radical and literary worlds.

Five Leaves publishes social history (writers include Colin Ward, William J Fishman, Gillian Darley), crime fiction (Stephen Booth, Russel McLean, Danuta Reah), young adult fiction (Bali Rai, David Belbin, Alan Gibbons), fiction (Rod Madocks, Jonathan Wilson, J. David Simons) and a wide range of books of secular Jewish interest including books on Jewish involvement in rock and jazz music. Our poetry list includes a number of anthologies, including the new Versions of the North: contemporary Yorkshire poetry, and individual collections by, for example, Andy Croft and Joanne Limburg.

Five Leaves lead title this spring is London Fictions, a set of essays on important London novels from the days of George Gissing to modern times with Zadie Smith. Essayists include Ken Worpole, Sarah Wise, Cathi Unsworth and Jerry White. This collection complements our New London Editions imprint, which reprints forgotten “London” novels including books by Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton.

Five Leaves is an activist press, jointly running the long-standing Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire and States of Independence in Leicester, promoting independent publishing. In 2011 we worked with the Cable Street Group celebrating the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, publishing five books for the occasion. In 2012 we organised an international event in London commemorating the 60^th anniversary of Stalin's murder of most of the leadership of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, publishing a collection of translations of the Soviet Yiddish writers who were executed. This year we organised a dayschool on Nottinghamshire working class writing tying in with a photographic exhibition based on Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This followed a day event in 2010 a few months after Alan Sillitoe died. Together with Derbyshire Libraries we also organised a day event with young adult writers.

With such diverse interests and a diverse range of writers, we now bring out an annual journal written by our regular and irregular writers as well as others who publish elsewhere but are close to the press. These book length collections include Maps and Utopia, with Crime following this summer and Rock in 2014.

Join our email list via info@fiveleaves.co.uk or follow us on Facebook or read http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.co.uk