QueenSpark helped Zap Art to celebrate twenty-five years of innovation with the launch of the ZAP book in late October 2006. Using the Zap's collection of videos, posters, flyers, listings, recordings and other artefacts, this charts the organisation's wild ride across a diverse cultural terrain encompassing performers, poets, musicians, dancers, comedians, Live Artists, DJs and pyrotechnicians.

In collaboration with the Migrant English Project at the Cowley Club, QueenSpark ran an oral history and creative writing programme for individuals newly-arrived in Brighton and Hove. Its aim was to increase their oral and literacy skills and to provide a fresh perspective on how and why people from around the world move to Brighton. Some of the participants' stories of survival and escape are published in the book Refuge.

The Cowley Club was named in tribute to Harry Cowley, a controversial Brighton figure who campaigned on behalf of improved housing and anti-fascism. Who was Harry Cowley?, a reprint of one of our most popular books, charts his life and offers readers a fascinating insight into how the city developed and the political battles that were fought - quite literally - on the streets.

Roofless resulted from two QueenSpark projects: 'Write to Life' and 'The Ideal Home?'. Both involved working with homeless and ex-homeless individuals (using photography, video, audio and text) to document and record their lives.

Some of this material was collected for 'The Ideal Home?' exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (14 November 2006 - 18 February 2007). Other material was derived from weekly 'Write to Life' workshops for homeless and ex-homeless individuals. Using past QueenSpark publications as a starting-point, these workshops encouraged homeless people to improve their literacy skills and were so successful that group members are continuing to meet on their own initiative. Some are also contributing to The Deckchair website.

QueenSpark Books is known for its life histories. Many early books were based on individual people’s memoirs, but Pebble on the Beach was the first in the genre for sometime. This was because Tony Diamond spoke to us from the pages of his book and we were determined to add it to our collection.

You can listen to an interview with Tony on the My Brighton and Hove website or find out more about him by visiting his own website.

In another return to its roots, QueenSpark revisited Upper Gardner Street in the run up to Christmas 2006. Our aim was to showcase the city's changing landscape through a set of photographs previously unavailable. These photographs were originally featured in Back Street Brighton one of Queenspark's bestselling titles that is again available!

Setting a precident for reprints of popular QueenSpark books Who was Harry Cowley charts the life of a controversial figure from Brighton's past. Harry Cowley campaigned on behalf of improved housing and anti-fascism and his story offers readers a fascinating insight into how the city developed and the political battles that were fought - quite literally - on the streets.

A follow-up to Missing the Nile, Bangla Brighton tells the story of the arrival and settlement of Brighton & Hove’s Bengali community, as related by individuals from the community in a series of interviews, and a collection of their writings.

Funded by Awards for All and Brighton & Hove Council’s Arts Partnership Award, The Faith Project used oral history and video work to help members of the Sudanese Coptic, Muslim and Progressive Jewish communities to collate a history of how and why the followers of these faiths arrived in Brighton and the traditions and customs that they brought with them. Project extracts are featured in the newly launched book which focuses on the positive contribution that the faiths have made to the common heritage of the city.

A companion work to Alt-History, Alt Future is the result of a competition held to encourage people of all ages to think creatively about the Brighton and Hove’s future. The entries were judged and edited before publication, and include a vision of text-messaging in 2045, a description of how 'Zero Tolerance' might operate on the city’s streets in the not-too-distant future, through to a sci-fi 'DownsLand Experience'…

Alt-History is a fictional history of the city, as imagined by local people who entered a QueenSpark competition to create their own ‘histories’ of Brighton and Hove based around real places and events from the city’s recent and distant past. The tales, including an account of a Reverend from Ovingdean who invented Association Football and a little girl’s adventures on the Victorian West Pier, are a mixture of the funny, the poignant and the surreal. In them you will find love, revenge, murder, theft - and keep company with a few of the eccentric, heroic, extraordinary and compelling people of the city.