Friday 11 May 2012

Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing

Five Leaves is pleased to announce the winner of the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing - Debt: the first 5000 years  by David Graeber (Melville House). Appropriately, the award was given on Mayday at the trade union owned Bread and Roses pub in Battersea. The author was working abroad at the time, so Bill Godber, from Melville House's UK distributor, accepted the award on David's behalf. It must have felt like a journey into the past for Bill Godber, something of a veteran in radical publishing. The runner up was Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Island: tax havens and the men who stole the world (Bodley Head).
The award was presented by the author Nina Power, one of the judges, who described Graeber's book as "brilliantly researched, motivated by a clear political will and utterly indispensable, not only for understanding the terms of the world we live in, where we came from, but also for what we can do about changing them."
David Graeber wins a trophy and a cheque for £1000.

The Bread and Roses Award was funded and initiated by Five Leaves with the Alliance of Radical Bookseller and the support of Red Pepper, Peace News and the Morning Star.
The trustees of the award are Nik Gorecki (Housmans Bookshop), Mandy Vere (News from Nowhere Bookshop) and Ross Bradshaw (Five Leaves).
Five Leaves provided the prize money to establish the award and will continue to support Bread and Roses for two further years. We would welcome others as sponsors for this year's award, for books published in 2012.
I would like to thank Nik at Housmans for carrying through most of the work on the award when I had to drop out in the last few weeks.
Debt will be published in paperback on 12 June at £14.99 and carries the ISBN 9781612191812.
http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/

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