We are excited to present the exciting list of Kingston University Press.
All KUP titles are now available for order using the links below. P&p is free within the UK. [Payment for all books can be made safely and securely online through Nochex. For overseas purchases please use the Google checkout links..]
For all media enquiries please contact Lucy Boguslawski by emailing lucyboguslawski@legend-paperbooks.co.uk.
For all book shop order enquiries please email orders@legend-paperbooks.co.uk.
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New KUP Titles
Ripple 2012
Ripple is an annual student writers' anthology and a legacy of creative writing at Kingston University. Brought together through the generous time and donations of the Kingston Writing School, it is a collection of university students’ writing showcasing a cross-section of high quality work, edited and produced by MA students of Publishing and Creative Writing. This year's poetry, prose and dramatic pieces are based around the theme of "a moment in time."
RIPPLE 2012 is published by Kingston University Press at a retail price of £5.00. Copies can be ordered by emailing kupltd@hotmail.co.uk
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Beyond The Workshop: Creative Writing, Theory and Practice
Edited by Paul Perry
Published 29th March 2012
Price: £20.00
Beyond the Workshop arrives at a crucial time in the debates around creative writing studies. More and more writers, students and scholars are asking the questions: What is the role and future of creative writing in the academy? Does the workshop remain central to creative writing studies? What comes ‘beyond the workshop’?
Unlike many other studies on the evolution of the creative writing workshop, Beyond the Workshop not only provides a compelling suite of essays on the subject, but also contains a range of practical creative writing exercises.
- The exercises are original and effective ‘triggers’ from the contributors to Beyond the Workshop who are all writers and teachers of creative writing.
- International expertise: poets, novelists, short story writers, creative non-fiction writers and essayists from the UK, Ireland and the US.
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Kiskadee Girl
By Maggie Harris
Published 1st August 2011
Price: £12.99
Order your copy of Kiskadee Girl now - £12.99
In the small Caribbean town of Guyana town on the South American coast, a fifteen year old schoolgirl is forced to face her father’s sudden death, pre-empted by a strange foreboding.
This memoir of growing up in the 50s and 60s reflects a society that was trying to find its path after centuries of slavery and colonialism. Life for teenagers was at a crossroads between tradition and discipline, political awareness and a new-found voice influenced by literature, the music of Donovan and the new reggae sound, and the movies of Britain and America. In a world within worlds, love and dreams exist side by side as a young girl on the cusp of maturity discovers her sensuality in the midst of her country’s own movement towards independence.
Kiskadee Girl vividly re-imagines Guyana, named from the Amerindian Land of Many Waters. The Berbice River runs like an artery through the book's emotional and geographical landscape, carrying tug-boats and ghosts, bauxite, bones, and long-forgotten stories.
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The Story of Human Rights
By Marcello Flores
Published 28th July 2011
Price: £25.00
Order your copy of The Story of Human Rights now - £25.00 
Many of the most pressing matters in world news today concern the denial of human rights. Flores tells the dramatic tale of the development of human rights across continents, borders and boundaries.
How did the culture of human rights develop? How did different schools of thought influence the legal documents and measures over the centuries? Was the French Revolution truly the turning point for human rights?
This book analyses these fundamental questions and outlines the history of human rights from the 18th century to the present day. It captures in one lucid source the essential aspects of the subject and is both an introduction to the arguments, and the key to in-depth study of the concepts and principles.
While pushing the traditional boundaries between philosophical histories of rights and legal ones, Flores provides an objective approach to the modern-day, “westernised” concept, and expands it to analyze the contributions from African, Asian and Islamic cultures.
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Exciting projects
Kingston University Press new release
For centuries, the Armed Forces have used poetry and prose to describe the horrors of war. The celebrated First World War poets – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke – famously wrote powerful verses which still resonate today. But nowadays literary works about more modern conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Iraq or the Falklands, written by those involved are seldom seen. Now Kingston University aims to change all that, through a competition which has identified some of the best forces poets and authors.
Several hundred members of the Armed Forces, their families and friends submitted their poetry and prose as part of the Forces Stories and Poems competition. It was organised by the University to mark the 125th anniversary of the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (SSAFA) Forces Help.
The winning works are being printed in a celebratory booklet which is published by Kingston University Press, the University’s commercial publishing arm, and all profits will go to SSAFA Forces Help.
Copies of the collection are now available to order for £5.00 using the link below.
Order your copy of Forces Stories and Poems now - £5.00
For full details on the collection please click here
The competition is attracting great attention in the national press, including an article in the Times.
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KUP Titles - Out now!
The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy
By Christine Pullen
Published: 5th November 2010
Price £20.00
Order your copy of The Woman Who Dared now - £20.00 
Described by Oscar Wilde as ‘a girl of genius’, like him Amy Levy set out to challenge the status quo and ended up by destroying her life.
A trailblazer from the outset, she was the first Jewish woman to study at Newnham College Cambridge, a seasoned traveller, and a ground-breaking writer. But although her spirit was strong, her constitution was weak. Haunted throughout her life by depression, the difficulties that she faced as a free-thinking Jewish woman in Victorian society were compounded by problems that she brought upon herself. In the end she was unable to reconcile what Wilde termed ‘the cravings of her heart’ with the reality of her life. Unable to face the future, she brought her unhappiness to an end with an extraordinary self-inflicted death.
This ground-breaking biography takes the reader on an intriguing journey and brings Amy Levy to life once more, illustrating the problems faced by the women of her era and highlighting her role as a pioneer of the modernist movement.
Dr Christine Pullen is a free-lance writer and researcher who lives and works in London. She has contributed to scholarly publications and lectured to various groups on a variety of aspects of late nineteenth-century social history and women’s writing.
Read feature in the Jewish Chronicle
Read the review by Liselotte Glage in Women's Writing Download Review amy levy
Liselotte comments: 'The Woman Who Dared is not just a biography of a woman who went against the constraints set by ethnicity, middle-class education and gender. Pullen has gone into the recesses of Levy’s life, but this is only one of the book’s merits... Pullen goes far beyond biographical detail. She succeeds in providing an insight into the working of one of the defining periods in British cultural history.'
Read Theodore Porter's review in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online by clicking here
Theodore comments: 'The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen’s wide-ranging study of Levy and her work, while haunting it.'
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With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch
By David Morgan
Published on 8th March 2010
Price: £13.99
Order your copy of With Love and Rage now - £13.99
‘You have captured things about Iris that no-one else has’. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch’s biographer.
David Morgan met Iris Murdoch at the Royal College of Art in 1960s London. ‘Something clicked’. It was an unlikely alliance: he was a rebel from Birmingham, she was a famous writer who had come to London as grandee from Oxford. But their loving friendship was to endure for more than forty years.
Morgan’s painful, funny and irreverent account of their friendship vacillates between love and rage on both sides. His honesty is unnerving because it provides a sense of closeness to, and alienation from, a woman who is so different to the one we thought we knew. But this is not only a story about two remarkable individuals; it is about bohemian London, and also a story about how art is made.
This unconventional memoir is the author’s final farewell and his preservation of Iris Murdoch for eternity. But the legacy is not merely a personal one. For if interest in revelations about the life of any writer can only be justified by the light they shed on art and its creators, this invitation into the hidden corners of Iris Murdoch’s life, will enable a better insight into Murdoch herself, her novels, and the mind that shaped them.
David Morgan left school in Birmingham without qualifications and spent six years educating himself. Getting into the RCA, where in 1964 he met Iris Murdoch, proved to him that he couldn’t paint but that maybe he could write and teach, and encouraged by her, he ended up running part-time studies at a London university. Like many auto-didacts he has a ‘quiz’ knowledge of the world with many gaps, but would have had even more if he hadn’t met her. His debt to her is that she convinced him he had a mind.
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The Sound of Turquoise
By Gill Gregory
Published in November 2009
Price: £10.99
Order your copy of The Sound of Turquoise now - £10.99
‘This subtle, beautifully written narrative is irresistible. Built from stories within stories, memories within memories, it tells of a girl growing up in the sixties haunted by the three men in her family – her brother who has severe epilepsy, her mysterious psychiatrist father and her exotic Russian grandfather. The tenderness and the bleakness, the jokes and the tragic tensions evoked in Gill Gregory’s book are unforgettable. She is a fine writer with a gripping story to tell.' Isobel Armstrong
'A gentle, lyrical life history in which Gregory creates a space for her alter ego, 'Meg', to relive her experiences: some exhilarating, some too painful perhaps to recall directly. From ballet in Bloomsbury to Croydon's Orchid Ballroom, packed with eager teenagers waiting to see The Supremes, Gregory's narrative offers vivid sketches of venues and a strong sense of the bodily presence of those who frequented them. Preoccupied with the epilepsy of her brother, we watch Meg as she haunts the periphery [...] The Sound of Turquoise also recounts Meg's Russian grandfather's fairy-tale escape from 'exotic' Uzbekistan in 1904 but it is the details of the adoptive world he rallied round him in England that will perhaps most captivate the reader - the collection of Constable's landscapes paintings and his impassioned discussions with Benjamin Britten over their display at Aldeburgh.' - Madeline Clements, The Times Literary Supplement
'A mesmerizing story told with finesse and delicacy. One is absolutely immersed in worlds full of colours and scents and minute observations of human behaviour. Exquisite is the word that best describes The Sound of Turquoise, a book in which pain is gloriously transformed into gentle reconciliation.' - Boika Sokolova, author of Painting Shakespeare Red.
'Gill Gregory’s The Sound of Turquoise is wonderfully clear-eyed and absorbing. This memoir admirably conveys an acute and subtle sense of pain whilst also rejoicing in the world. I was sorry when I reached the end.' - Clare Brant, Kings College, London.
'Gill Gregory’s The Sound of Turquoise is a wonderful, compelling story. I was crying and laughing and loving this book and its characters all the way through. I didn’t want it to end. Although in many ways a very different story, I was reminded at times of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The Sound of Turquoise is written with great simplicity and clarity, whilst telling a many layered story of migration and its repercussions, spanning the period from 1904 to the 1990s. This is an absolutely must read in the New Year. Gill Gregory’s story rings very true.' - Jan Jaggard, Events Manager, Waterstone’s Bridport
'A powerful and haunting tale of migration which maps and explores the ways in which trauma continues to resonate through the generations. As a child of migrants from Poland and Croatia, The Sound of Turquoise resonated for me on many levels. The Sound of Turquoise is a beautiful and very dramatic story of the past told from the vantage point of the present. Here is a compelling tale of our times.' - Greg Kucich, author of Nineteenth-Century Worlds: global formations past and present
'A magical read. The Sound of Turquoise is one of those rare books that makes you take stock of your own life-story and reaches out to what is good in the world.' - Agnes Cserhati, editor of Rufus Books, Toronto
'Beautifully written and so, so gripping. The sensuous details are delightful. A wonderful book.' - Harmeet Ghumann, textile designer, India
Meg begins to make sense of her history when she reads an account of her Russian grandfather’s childhood. Fourteen year old Alexis’s life is devastated when gunmen execute his parents and siblings on their estate in Tashkent, from which he flees by train in 1904. She is entranced by his story, which includes a friendship with Benjamin Britten and a tale attached to Constable’s painting, Chain Pier, Brighton.
When Meg begins to write later in her life, her warm, spirited voice tells a story which will resonate with anyone who has felt strangely alone within their own family.
Spanning the 20th century The Sound of Turquoise challenges our perceptions of love and loss. This is a remarkable work of life writing that leads us to explore our ancestry in order to understand the ways in which the past continues to haunt and shape our lives in the present.
Gill Gregory taught in adult education before being awarded a PhD in English at Birkbeck College, University of London. For the past ten years she has worked as a lecturer at The University of Notre Dame. She has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement and other publications include a monograph on Adelaide Procter, Poetry, Feminism & Fathers (Ashgate). Her first collection of poetry, In Slow Woods, is published by Rufus Books.
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Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories
By Will Buckingham
Published in November 2009
Price: £10.99
Order your copy of Finding Our Sealegs now - £10.99
When it comes to ethics, it seems that we are all at sea.Since the beginning, the philosophers have always dreamed of finally reaching solid ground, but their proofs and demonstrations and laws have failed to bring us into harbour. Incapable of defining virtue, we manage to tell tales about it; not quite sure what justice is, we still spin yarns about the just and the unjust.
Casting the reader adrift onto the sea of stories, attentive to the changes in the winds and the tides, through both philosophy and storytelling, this book explores ethics not as a means of finding our way back home to a safe harbour, but instead as a way of acclimatising ourselves to life on the seas of uncertainty.
Will Buckingham has a PhD in philosophy and currently teaches at De Montfort University. His novel, Cargo Fever is published by Tindal Street Press.
Review: 'Combining storytelling with philosophy in a highly engaging way, Will manages to give a bigger context to the stories and allure to the philosophy. It is also a book that draws on Will’s wide reading and experience, of travel in Indonesia and other parts of Asia, of both Buddhist and Western thought, and of both philosophy and literature. All of this feeds enticingly into a rich, lucid feast of a book.' - http://www.moralobjectivity.net/endless_voyage.html
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Sustainability In Practice From Local to Global: Making a Difference
By Nicola Corrigan, Sarah Sayce and Ros Taylor
Published in February 2010
Price: £18.99
Order your copy of Sustainability in Practice from Local to Global now - £18.99
Sarah Sayce, a Chartered Surveyor by profession, is now Professor and Head of the School of Surveying and Planning at Kingston University. She is Chair of the University’s Centre for Sustainable Communities Achieved through Integrated Professional Education (C-SCAIPE).
Ros Taylor is an ecologist by background. At Kingston she has developed and run the environmental sciences undergraduate programmes and has instigated undergraduate and postgraduate courses on sustainable development and led sustainability initiatives with local businesses.
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Caribbean Chemistry Tales from St Kitts
By Christopher Vanier
Published in February 2010
Price: £12.99
Order your copy of Caribbean Chemistry Tales from St Kitts now - £12.99
Order Overseas copy - £15.99 (inc P&P):
Ah, to be an embryo again. Vanier’s story begins where we all begin: conception. This delightful piece of life writing, set on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, recalls the mischief of Vanier’s childhood: sneaking out to the cinema after school hours, throwing stones at a passing car, disastrous experiments involving various acids and a rocket. Is this boy lost in the plain sailing of childhood or can he turn his curiosity into Caribbean Chemistry? This is a story of self-discovery, told candidly in language rich enough to eat: “Breadfruit, breadnut, bamboo, lignum vitae, marouba, weedee, and calabash.”
Funny and engaging – a story about breaking the barriers of identity and finding them again. A rare view of the emigrants tale.
Christopher Vanier retired from engineering to write. He has read at the British Institute of Paris and The American Library of Paris. In 2006 he was awarded first prize at the annual WICE Paris Writers’ Workshop. In the same year he won a fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya. Vanier lives in Paris.
Review:
"'Caribbean Chemistry' portrays the lost history of British West Indian life in the 1940s and 1950s, a world emerging from the shadows of the even darker, slave-holding past. The tensions of who could play with whom; of who visited whom; or of how people saw themselves and one another in terms of colour, dress, social rank and education march through the narrative of Vanier's early life. For someone who lived through those times of fading colonialism, Vanier's book makes compelling reading. His St Kitts is no different from my Jamaica: going to a high school was a matter of narrow privilege. Going to a university required an act of God: a scholarship (one for each territory) granted by the island government. More poignant still are Vanier's accounts of how a single book on child-rearing could - in the hands of his determined mother - alter opinions and behaviour in that culture. One sees so many ripples as the story takes us from infancy to lively boyhood to the moral struggles of adolescence. This book should be read by every young West Indian, and, for the middle-aged and elderly, it will revive rich visions of our past." - Jean D'Costa, University of the West Indies, 1962-77
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About Kingston University Press
Legend Press are proud to announce a new association with Kingston University Press Ltd, effective immediately. Legend Press will be representing KUP into the retail, wholesale, academic and library trade throughout the UK and Ireland.
Legend Press’s extensive network of key contacts with the top buyers throughout the trade will ensure that this trade-led university press will receive the widest possible outreach for their titles.
All titles will be handled in association with one of the UK’s premier book distributors, LBS (Littlehampton Book Services), who distribute for leading publishers including Hachette, Hamlyn, Octopus publishing Group, Taschen UK and Orion. Legend Press's sales operation will provide a state of the art order requisition and fulfilment service for the impressive list being developed by Kingston University Press Ltd. This list ranges from life-writing to popular philosophy, books on human rights and sustainability. KUP operates within the best tradition of the trade-led university press, which is committed to bringing new thinking to the cultural debates across the board.
Legend Press have several successful partnerships with other presses. In June 2009 Legend Press launched the first authoritative investment guide to Morocco written in the English Language, in association with the Shashoua Foundation (supported by the Moroccan Government). Other partnerships and projects include work with small presses including Picnic Publishing and author Bonnie Greer. Set up in 2008, Legend Press run one of the largest book shop promotions outside of the chains ‘Exclusively Independent’, selecting titles submitted from over 100 UK publishers, distributed by Gardners Books to independent book shops across the UK and London Libraries.
Trade success for Legend Press titles include: Salt and Honey by Candi Miller (featured in the World Book Day Top 10 books in 2008), Lord Lucan: My Story by William Coles (featured in 6 nationals in one week), and the acquisition of world rights for best-selling Swiss author Zoë Jenny’s latest novel, whose debut The Pollen Room was sold into 27 languages.
Legend Press have achieved extensive sales success with titles repeatedly in front of store promotions on the high street, in addition to specific company-wide promotions including ‘Waterstone’s Welsh book of the Month’, ‘Borders Book Group pick of the month’, ‘Foyles’ Independent Publisher promotion’ and ‘Blackwell’s Summer Reading Campaign’.
