Radical histories: book recommendations from our Radical Book Fair speakers

The theme for 2024's Edinburgh Radical Book Fair is ‘From Where We Stand’. We invite you to join us in honouring the struggles that came before, their place in the present and how they shape our visions for the future.

We asked the speakers and chairs who will be appearing at this year’s fair to name books on radical histories that have inspired them to continue their work.

Buckle up! Here are the answers we received - in the order in which speakes appear in the program. The books are listed at the end, with a few exceptions where the title isn't currently available through the shop:

Marianne Brooker - “Writing Intervals, I felt a constant tension between my desire for more radical, expansive politics, and the short-term, necessary-but-insufficient work of lawmaking. I didn’t always know to what end I was writing a book, what register to speak in, or how to sharpen my grief into something that could be materially useful. In these moments, I often went back to Veronica Gago’s Feminist International, about organising Global Women’s Strikes. Indirectly, it helped me to understand how to put my pain in a historical context of oppression and transformation, and to imagine beyond that context: ‘We do not know what we’re capable of until we experience the displacement of the limits that we’ve been made to believe and obey. … To strike in this register is to rethink everything.’

Richa Okhandiar-MacDougall - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Race to the bottom: reclaiming antiracism by Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks, Colour of madness: mental health and race in technicolour by Samara Linton & Rianna Walcott, Warp & weft: psycho-emotional health, politics and experiences by Lisa Fannen.

Sami Hermez - Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Basma Ghalayini - The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

Jess Brough - How We Get Free, Ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis.

Alycia Pirmohamed - Dionne Brand's entire publication history.

Gabrielle de la Puente - Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Cassie Thornton's The Hologram, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mordew by Alex Pheby

Faridah Abike-Iyimide - The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Animal Farm.

Nadine Aisha Jassat - I've been very inspired by Audre Lorde's work, i.e. Sister Outsider. 404 Ink's graphic novel anthology We Shall Fight Until We Win celebrates the stories of some of the women who also feature in my novel The Hidden Story of Estie Noor.

Nat Raha - Some recent loves: François Vergés - A Feminist Theory of Violence, Travis Alabanza - None of the Above, Shanice McBean and Aviah Day - Abolition Revolution

Mijke van der Drift - RDG Kelley, Freedom Dreams; John Lennons' Dead by Sile Daragh.

Harry Josephone Giles - The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin, Decolonising the Mind by Ngugi Wa Thiong`o, The Tao Ching.

Nick Bano - "My work tries to be faithful to Marx’s method in Das Kapital. The book (Against Landlords) was also heavily influenced by Ellen Meiksins Wood’s ‘Origin of Capitalism’, Gargi Bhattacharyya’s work on racial capitalism, Nadine el-Enany’s ‘(B)ordering Britain’, and the work of Mike Davis work writ large, and the many and various ‘histories from below’ (pamphlets, books, propaganda, zines, ephemera around housing) that I came across while researching."

Holly Pester - Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (Myra Bergman Ramos, Trans) and News From Nowhere, William Morris, and Helen Charman's Mother State.

Hamza Hamouchene - The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

Alex Lee - To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation by Pauli Murray, I Hope we Choose Love: A Trans Girls Notes from the end of the world by Kai Cheng Thom

Hannah Proctor - Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Evie Muir - Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider, Ruth Wilson Gilmore – Abolition Geography, We, the Heartbroken – Gargi Bhattacharyya, Parable of the Sower – Octavia E Butler

Kate Pickett - Renwick, Chris. Bread for all: The origins of the welfare state..

Oliver Escobar - Participation and Democratic Theory, Carole Pateman; Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser; Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright; Working the Spaces of Power, Janet Newman; The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey; Democratic Innovations, Graham Smith

Marwan Kaabour - Alfaba'iyyat Falasteen (Palestinian Alphabet), Mohieddine El Labbad; Gay Talk, Bruce Rodger

Henry Bell - Vijay Prashad, particularly Red Star Over the Third World. Jean Jaures A Socialist History of the French Revolution. Bookchin's The Third Revolution.

June Thomas - Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, by John D’Emilio; Finding the Movement, by Finn Enke; The Gentrification of the Mind, by Sarah Schulman; Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel

Leah Cowan - Black British Feminism: A Reader edited by Heidi Safia Mirza; Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain by Amrit Wilson; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman; Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean; Black Resistance to British Policing by Adam Elliot-Cooper

Gracie Mae Bradley - Françoise Vergès, A Feminist Theory of Violence

Skye Arundhati Thomas - "Alaa Abd El-Fattah's You Have Not Yet Been Defeated has had a profound effect on my own writing practice, as has the non-fiction political writing of Fernanda Melchor. I find myself looking for writing that is driven by anger, humour, clarity and resolve. Something that has this, but in an entirely different formulation, is the writing of Curzio Malaparte, which I have been reading most recently."

Tatevik Sargsyan - Azadi by Arundhati Roy; Dub by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman; DMZ COLONY by Don Mee Choi, No Sign by Peter Balakian

Danny Dorling - Immanuel Wallerstein’s four volume history of the world - I began reading them as a precious teenager. (start with "The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century: 01”)

Twimukye Macline Mushaka - Long walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela; The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; Chavs by Owen Jones; The Power by Naomi Alderman

Nasar Meer - "Currently re-reading Black Reconstruction in America, by W.E.B. Du Bois published in 1935, which follows the period after the Civil War, from 1860 to 1880, that focuses on Black Americans' role in the Reconstruction era. One of its themes is how Reconstruction offered a rare chance for a radical reordering of American society—a period when, for the first time, Black and white citizens, especially poor whites, could have united for social and economic reform. Instead, white supremacy and capitalism colluded to stifle this potential, leading to the eventual rollback of gains made by Reconstruction through mechanisms like Jim Crow laws and racial terror. It’s a searing critique of the historiography of the time and helped lay the intellectual groundwork for later civil rights movements by reclaiming the agency and contributions of Black Americans in one of the most crucial periods of U.S. history."