Smith, Erica

The sub-title of this book condenses a complex life into a compact haiku.

The author was born in London in 1965 to a Colombian mother and a father with Hungarian heritage. Charlie Kiss is his real name, but when he was born, his birth certificate identified him as female. He lived as a lesbian until his early 30s when he realised that he was transgender. It took until 2007 for him to complete his transition.

The early part of Charlie’s life saw him growing up playing…

This book was first published 25 years ago as Gay Pride to commemorate what was then the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. This edition has lost the word ‘Gay’ (embracing the wider range of contemporary ‘Pride’) and has gained some additional photographs.

Introductory texts by Peter Tatchell and Hilton Als have been added to essays by Allen Ginsberg and Jill Johnston.

In Tatchell’s foreword, he reminds us of the massive strides made in the last 50 years. ‘Back…

In 1979, the trade unionist and communist Richard Scott founded Leeds Postcards, which he named after the city where he lived and worked. The first postcard, beautifully illustrated by Peter Smith, was sponsored by the occupational health and safety magazine, Hazards Bulletin and warned of the dangers posed by ‘visual display units’ – the name given to computer screens when they began to be used in the workplace. Forty years later, despite computers taking over our lives and social…

In the summer of 1968, a young man named Sam Lord combined forces with Peter Dukes and Jean Lou Msika (a French Tunisian expelled from France because of his involvement in the May uprisings in Paris) to set up a low-cost/no-cost screenprint workshop in a damp basement on London’s Camden Road.

Over the next three years, the Poster Workshop printed thousands of revolutionary/protest posters from hundreds of designs. Peter Dukes kept a copy of every poster that was printed.
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Alex Nunn’s engaging style makes Corbyn’s journey from jam-making backbencher to leader of the opposition seem both exciting and totally rational.

Last year, The Candidate won the Bread and Roses award for radical publishing. That first edition traced Corbyn’s rise up to the attempted coup by right-wing Labour MPs in mid-2016.

This new edition includes a 100-page(!) chapter covering last June’s snap general election and the incredible surge of support for…

emergency use soft shoulder (1966). Photo: Josh White, courtesy Corite Art Centre, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft may seem an unlikely place to host an exhibition of 1960s Warhol-inspired socially-engaged prints from California, but these brightly-coloured, life-affirming texts by Corita Kent make for an exciting dialogue with artworks by members of the Roman Catholic local artistic community in the permanent collection.

In 1921,…

This book is a singular account of a community of action which didn’t just witness history, but was instrumental in changing it: Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. 25 years on, life experiences can be forgotten, so I am grateful to Howard and Moulin for collecting these reminiscences for posterity.

Like the film Pulp Fiction, this book begins at the end – with an action in 1993 where 16 women climbed into the grounds of Buckingham Palace to condemn nuclear testing in the…

Kate Evans has created beautiful, radical comic strips since the 1990s. She has drawn and written about her experience as a tree protester at the Newbury Bypass, climate change, pregnancy and breastfeeding and the life of Rosa Luxemburg.

Threads came about as the result of a trip to volunteer at the Jungle refugee camp in Calais in October 2015, followed by two further trips in January and February 2016. The graphic novel documents Evans’ experiences in the camp, and the…

If there was ever a book that should be reviewed in Peace News this is it. Not only is 83-year old Margaretta D’Arcy a lifelong campaigner for peace but it was Peace News that drove her, at 79, to climb the fence at Shannon airport and protest on the runway – not once, but twice:

‘On the whole in the anti-war movement there was no real support for non-violent direct action. But then Peace News carried an article about an international week of protest…

Hsiao-Hung Pai is a Taiwanese writer who has lived in London’s East End since 1991. Over three years she spent many hours interviewing far-right extremists and campaigners, often maintaining contact with them.

’Their faces on the TV screens and the front pages of newspapers show such deep anger, hatred and, above all, alienation, yet no explanation is ever given’, she writes. ‘Surely, I thought to myself, no one’s born a bigot. So what are the circumstances that have driven them…

There can’t be many books reviewed in PN that have been compared to the writings of James Joyce and also need the help of www.urbandictionary.com to explain their vocabulary. But please don’t let either of these facts put you off reading this beautifully-written coming of age story!

The book opens with a map of Baltimore in the 1980s, annotated with the contemporary version of ‘Here be Dragons’ (‘Leakin Park – body…

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born into an aristocratic family in 1792, the year that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and he died just short of his thirtieth birthday. He did not achieve great fame or fortune during his whirlwind of a life – the publisher John Murray described him as ‘the vilest wretch in existence’ ­­– but his poems and pamphlets were circulated amongst radicals at the time and his work is now embedded in our literary establishment.…

‘It’s good to read outside your comfort zone’, I told myself when I was asked to review this collection of short stories. I had no real idea what ‘speculative fiction’ was and, of the 29 authors, the only names which were at all familiar to me were Angela Carter, Ursula K Le Guin and the visual artist Leonora Carrington.

According to the cover, the editors are a literary power couple with awards for both editing and writing fantasy. Their two-page introduction, in which…

For 40 years, Kim Stallwood (sometimes known as ‘The Grumpy Vegan’) has been an active animal advocate. Growl combines autobiography, social history and an exploration of the philosophy and practice of animal rights. It is an engaging and readable book which made me draw parallels with other areas of nonviolent campaigning.After working in a chicken slaughterhouse, Stallwood became a vegetarian in 1974, aged 19. Two years later he became a fully-fledged vegan. Unlike today, when all…

My favourite local pub is the Horse & Groom – up at the top of Norman Road. It proudly boasts its history as the oldest pub in St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex, and is a fine example of what I have always called ‘OMPs’ – Old Man’s Pubs. That’s not an insult, it’s just a special kind of pub.

You enter and there’s usually a warm, quiet atmosphere – a bit of chat at the bar, a few small groups of people sat around tables, a solitary chap reading a paper with a well-behaved dog…