Bread & Roses Award: 2025 Longlist Announced

The judges for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing are delighted to announce the 2025 longlist!

This year's longlist announcement was timed to coincide with Independent Bookshop Week to highlight the importance of independent bookshops, particularly radical bookshops, in celebrating books which speak to the present political moment.

The Bread and Roses Award, presented by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and administered by Lighthouse Bookshop, celebrates radical, accessible, politically left non-fiction that offers new perspectives and insights.

Over 100 books were sent by publishers for consideration, from publishing houses big and small across the industry.

The books chosen this year cover a wide array of topics which are critical to the present political discussion in the UK. Among them are social inequality, police violence, digital innovation, health politics, climate change, marginalised histories of identity, feminism for all, and the experience of forced displacement and refuge.

With that being said, we are always limited by what publishers submit. Any obvious omissions from the present political and human rights discourse can be attributed to an absence of titles in the submission period.

After careful deliberation, the judges selected 16 books for the longlist:

• A World Without Racism: Building Antiracist Futures, ed. Joshua Virasami (Pluto)
• Defiance: Racial Injustice, Police Brutality, A Sister’s Fight for the Truth, by Janet Alder (Dialogue)
• Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism, by Heather Parry (404 Ink)
• Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World, by Marijam Did (Verso)
• Intervals, by Marianne Brooker (Fitzcarraldo)
• Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir, by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott (MACK)
• Poor Artists, by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (Particular Books)
• Race and Education: Reproducing White Supremacy in Britain, by Kalwant Bhopal (Pelican books)
• Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara, by Joanna Allan (University of West Virginia Press)
• Scattered: The making and unmaking of a refugee, by Aamna Mohdin (Bloomsbury)
• Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation, by Danny Dorling (Hurst)
• Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos, by Jake Hall (Trapeze)
• The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, by Andy Beckett (Penguin Books)
• Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds, by Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift (Pluto)
• Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing, by Rageshri Dhairyawan (Trapeze)
• Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion, by Eleanor Medhurst (Hurst)

Meera Ghanshamdas, Chair of Judges and co-director of Round Table Books, said: “This is my second year working on the Bread and Roses award, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences that I have had while working in books. The titles chosen for this year by our tremendous panel of judges are at the forefront of radical politics conversation, approaching their subject matter with nuance and sensitivity.”

The shortlist will be announced on 24th July 2025. The winner, winning £500, will be announced on 15th September 2025

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
• is accessible and readable by the interested reader
• relates to global, national, local or specialist areas of interest

The Bread & Roses Award was established by Housmans in 2012, and has since been run in collaboration with Five Leaves Bookshop and then Lighthouse – Edinburgh’s Radical Bookshop. Past winners of the Award include Annabel Sowemimo, Ellen Clifford, Johny Pitts, Reni Eddo-Lodge and, in its very first year, David Graeber.