Bread and Roses Award shortlist 2025: reading recommendation from Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas

We asked the writers shortlisted for the 2025 Bread and Roses Award to recommend a book which has been shortlisted for the award in the last five years - and we're thrilled to share their thoughts in the coming weeks, before we announce the winner of the award on 15th September (click the link to join us for the online event)!

Our first blog post comes from Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas, authors of the brilliant Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir. In Pleasure Gardens, Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott seek to make visible the conditions of the military occupation and blackouts in Kashmir.

Here is their contribution...

Hil Aked’s Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (Verso, 2023) is an incisive investigation of British Zionism, tracing its imperial roots and exposing its influence across politics, law, academia and media. Shortlisted for the 2024 Bread and Roses Award, Aked employs power-structure research to ask: Who are the main actors defending Israeli apartheid in Britain? What strategies do they use? The book meticulously maps the emergence of Zionist civil society groups in the UK and provides a vital chapter on the movement’s history.

Published in February 2023, Friends of Israel has only gained urgency, as genocide in Gaza has unfolded before our eyes. A June 2025 YouGov poll showed that 55% of British people oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, yet state support endures – and escalates. A month later, the direct-action network Palestine Action was banned under UK terrorism laws, in a blatant repression of the right to protest.

Repression of dissent and censorship are intensifying worldwide. This August 2025, the Indian national government banned 25 books in Indian-occupied Kashmir, many documenting human rights abuses, as bookshops are raided and critical voices silenced. Our book, Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK, 2024), also examines the military occupation, as we chart the relationship between India and Israel, Kashmir and Gaza, to show how the two occupations learn from each other and share resources. We stand in solidarity with writers and researchers targeted for telling the truth.