Goldsmiths Press celebrates 10th anniversary

Goldsmiths Press is marking 10 years of inventive publishing by showcasing ten of the most significant titles that it has published over the last decade.

Goldsmiths Press has published 150 books, with over 60,000 copies sold. Working with 119 authors from 20 countries, the university press has launched nine book series and their own imprint, Gold SF, for intersectional feminist science fiction. 

The ten titles below exemplify Goldsmiths Press' mission to encourage the cross-disciplinary and genre-bending. Realising its mission has been no mean feat, as Goldsmiths Press director Sarah Kember explained:  

“Our mission has not changed in the last ten years; it is to push back against the constraints on scholarly communication brought about by commercial publishing and the REF (research excellence framework), to champion Goldsmiths’ research and practice, and to generate a culture that is inventive rather than restricted.” 

Ten titles for ten years 

Goldsmiths Press share the ten books that built them, as they celebrate a decade of publishing. 

Notes Made While Falling - Jenn Ashworth (2019) 

A genre-bending memoir from a writer at a time when she could not write due to illness. Exceptional life writing about a deeply traumatic childbirth and its aftermath from one of the best novelists in the UK.  

“This exceptional book cracks open the complexity of human experience, exploring how to live and inhabit a body in the aftermath of trauma and loss. Ashworth expertly weaves the broader world into her story, threading art, writing, philosophy and history, from Dickens to Mantel, Freud to Anne Boyer. Notes Made While Falling is an evocative and profound meditation on living, art and survival,” said Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations. 

The Broadcast 41. Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist - Carol A. Stabile (2018) 

At the dawn of the Cold War era, forty-one women working in American radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. The reason given was communist influence, but in reality, these women were a threat to traditional portrayals of the American family. The book delves into what US TV and radio were lost when these diverse and ambitious women were blacklisted through original archival research.  

“Trenchant historical lessons about rightwing oppression of voices for social justice emerge from Stabile’s stunning archival efforts,” said Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. 

Making the World Clean. Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism - Françoise Vergès 

This book examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies and resources and the structural denial of vital needs like clean water, shelter and access to health services. Vergès explores social relations that have made cleaning into ‘drudgery’ and racialised, gendered, poorly-paid job – despite it being necessary for a functioning society.  

“Françoise Vergès uncovers the violent, colonial social relations that make certain people cleaners of waste, while capitalism continues to waste lives and ecosystems. Capitalism won’t clean up its act, with the help of this book we can cleanse the world of capitalism,” said Tithi Bhattacharya, Professor of South Asian History, Purdue University. 

Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance - Brandon LaBelle (2018) 

Sonic Agency highlights the invisible, disruptive and affective qualities of sound, in a world dominated by the visual, and asks – could contemporary resistance be auditory? 

“LaBelle is correct to stress that the public sphere is usually imagined and understood in relation to visibility, and far less often in relation to sound. Sound offers a way into thinking about who and what is unseen, and appears, on the surface, to offer a more radical, if harder to grasp conception of what insurrectionary politics might look, or rather sound, like,” said Nina Power, The Wire. 

Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology - Miyarrka Media (2019) 

Building on a ten-year collaboration by community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, this book presents a portrait of an Indigenous community using mobile phones inventively in the difficult circumstances of remote Aboriginal life. It was the winner of the 2020 Gregory Bateson Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology.  

“I think this is a fantastic contribution to an anthropology that is constantly pushing for both experimental forms and collaborative work, but so rarely really delivering on those ideas,” said Faye Ginsburg, Professor of Anthropology, New York University. 

Mathematics For Ladies: Poems on Women in Science - Jessy Randall (2022) 

Hilarious, heart-breaking, and perfectly pitched, these carefully researched poems about historical women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine will bring you to both laughter and outrage in just a few lines.  

“The only good science fiction poems ever written are by Jessy Randall,” said Annalee Newitz, author of The Future of Another Timeline and Autonomous

Schrodinger’s Wife (and Other Possibilities) - Pippa Goldschmidt (2024) 

The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science. It was shortlisted for Best Collection in The British Science Fiction Association Awards. 

“Zigzagging across a century of history, from the first world war to the devastated Anthropocene Earth, these stories subvert the glamorous masculine mythos and hubris of twentieth century physics and twenty-first century Mars exploration. Playfully innovative in structure and voice, they are also a lot of fun to read,” said Susan M. Gaines, author of Accidentals and Carbon Dreams. 

Economic Science Fictions - William Davies (2018) 

From the libertarian economics of Ayn Rand to Aldous Huxley’s consumerist dystopias, economics and science fiction have often orbited each other. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies has deliberately merged the two worlds, asking how we might harness the power of the utopian imagination to revitalise economic thinking.  

“What Davies and his contributors ultimately carve out is a space of hope. Nothing is inevitable, and the ending to our story remains to be written,” said Hua Hsu, New Yorker. 

Academic Diary, or Why Higher Education Still Matters - Les Back (2016) 

The first book published by Goldsmiths Press. Les Back chronicled three decades of his academic career, and this book presents everyday aspects of campus like and meditations on larger forces as a collection of diary entries from a single academic year.  

“When discussions of higher education in England are dominated by loans and questions of finance, it's all too easy to forget about the lived, transformative experience of education. Episodes in Academic Diary serve as healthy reminders of what ought to be central to universities and colleges: learning,” said Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. 

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century - Dhanveer Singh Brar (2021) 

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban - ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Brar analyses the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress. 

“This book will be unlike anything you’ve ever read before: challenging and revealing, it refuses to pander to some of the more predictable observations of mainstream music coverage,” reviewed in DJ Mag.