Amber Massie-Blomfield, Author at Writers Rebel

Read: Q&A with Diana McCaulayDiana McCaulay and Monique Roffey

1st October 2020

Diana McCaulay, Jamaican environmentalist and author of Daylight Come, (Peepal Tree Press), spoke with Trinidadian author and Writers Rebel co-founder, Monique Roffey. They talked about about ‘Goatillas’, a carbon Neutral Caribbean, deadly heat, and Climate Change as bedfellow with our Colonial past. Diana, congratulations on publishing such a relevant book for our […]

Read: In the Shadow of the StormRichard Georges

1st October 2020

The day before the sky swallowed us, I sat in my car in the parking lot of one of the island’s crowded supermarkets and listened to the radio for storm updates. The 11 o’clock was late, gospel music blared hope on the AM channels and an aimless circle spun blindly on my phone. Bobby’s […]

Read: Three PoemsSue Hubbard

1st October 2020

Sakura Not Yoshino in April when blossom-fringed branches bow towards the ground in prayer beneath an early moon illuminating the frailty of white clouds where friends gather to sip sake and petals flutter to the ground pale as moths but deep January in Islington’s Highbury Fields where these tender buds this early […]

Read: Finding Meaning in GriefLiz Jensen

24th September 2020

Liz Jensen gave this speech at the XR event Forfattere gør oprør, which was held in front of Danmarks Radio (DR), the national broadcaster, on the afternoon of 18 September 2020. Grief can do two things. It can shrink your soul – or it can expand it. Most of us here know grief. And if […]

Read: Q&A with Neel MukherjeeNeel Mukherjee

24th September 2020

What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? I’m not sure writers have much of a role in the world we inhabit now, or that we ever did: literature is wildly overrated; remember Auden’s ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? I say this with sorrow and anger and disillusionment, not triumph. […]

Read: Tufton Street – Fiery Words Under a Police HelicopterCharlotte Du Cann

17th September 2020

The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in […]

Watch: Paul Hilder lays out the facts of the matterPaul Hilder

10th September 2020

Paul Hilder was one of twenty speakers at 55 Tufton Street. His was the most forensic attack on Climate Change denial. After watching this, you’ll be left in no doubt how we’re being played, and who we’re being played by. If you feel strongly about the climate and ecological emergency, join us and help […]

Watch: Jay Griffiths asks – How qualified are the Climate Change deniers?Jay Griffiths

10th September 2020

As part of the ‘Tell No Lies About Climate Change’ action at 55 Tufton Street, Jay Griffiths anatomised the qualifications of those spreading confusion and disinformation about the state of the planet. It’s funny and horrifying in equal measure. If you feel strongly about the climate and ecological emergency, join us and help make […]

Watch: Zadie Smith on grief, protest and liesZadie Smith

10th September 2020

On 2 September 2022, Zadie Smith joined Writers Rebel at 55 Tufton Street, and delivered a speech that has already been shared and watched thousands of times. This is a defining moment in the struggle for climate justice. If you feel strongly about the climate and ecological emergency, join us and help make a […]

Read: #LiesLiesLiesJessica Townsend

31st August 2020

I first got involved with Extinction Rebellion when I was researching a novel set in 2030. As I read the science, waves of emotion crashed over me: anger, dismay, grief. I had a lot of questions: why hadn’t I heard any of this before? Why wasn’t the crisis on the front pages? Why, too, […]

Read: Q&A with Xiaolu GuoXiaolu Guo

27th August 2020

What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? X: the implications of the anthropocene are huge. We writers should help to provide a change of vision about our place in the world, on this planet. But if we are reaching the final stretch of anthropocene, then the writers are […]

Read: Green GuiltAnouchka Grose

13th August 2020

Much is made of the relationships, the intersections, the similarities and differences between various feelings and emotional states. How do you tell envy from jealousy? Why does love so readily turn to hate? What are the tonal variations between shame and embarrassment, fear and anxiety, guilt and remorse? I find myself churning over these […]

Read: A dispatch from the French AlpsNatasha Randall

13th August 2020

There were blue tits nesting in the eaves above our front door this spring. The parent birds brought beakfuls of fat green worms and spindly flying bugs for the calling babies. We moved into a small gite, the lower floor of a chalet at the top of a small French mountain just a month […]

Read: Q&A with John McCullough, Hawthornden Prize 2020 winnerJohn McCullough

13th August 2020

Tell us a bit about your current work on environmental issues and the pandemic, and your book about personal and social anxiety. My collection of poems Reckless Paper Birds contains a large number of poems that inhabit my experiences of severe anxiety and vulnerability. Since it came out, I’ve written a number of poems […]

Feral in the BurbsSir Simon Schama

7th August 2020

The Hudson Valley suburbs, I am happy to report, remain a savage place. Two days ago (in the first week of August 2020) we took a direct hit from Tropical Storm Isaias and bosky turned brutal. White oaks and red maples, shag bark hickories and tulip trees bent, broke or uprooted, smashing down on […]

Read: Animal EdenZakia Carpenter-Hall

5th August 2020

Animal Eden It was the year of the viral video, nature coming out of hiding. We were supposed to believe that within weeks, animal life had overwritten us with their joy and reckless abandon, as if instincts told them like radio waves signalling through the ether that humans are under quarantine and no […]

Read: Blog From the Treetops in the Roald Dahl WoodsAmy Caitlin

5th August 2020

‘On a hill above the valley there was a wood. In the wood there was a huge tree. Under the tree there was a hole. In the hole lived Mr Fox and Mrs Fox and their four Small Foxes.’ These are the opening lines of Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl. It’s July […]

Read: William Morris and the Art of DissentClare Conway

5th August 2020

It was a windswept Saturday afternoon in early February this year, as I huddled by the doorway of the Coach House at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith waiting to meet the writer Zakia Carpenter-Hall. “… the wallpaper man.” A snippet from a breeze-snatched conversation interrupted my thoughts. William Morris: Wallpaper Man. Somewhat irrationally the words irked […]

Read: On RiskA L Kennedy

30th July 2020

Dundee, where I grew up, is currently among the world’s coolest small cities. It has a V&A and hotels surrounding the V&A, not just to mask the city centre from visitors. In my day, Dundee was post-industrial, reliant on a few failing employers, full of health and social risks, particularly for the poor. But […]

Listen: Nina Lahkani asks ‘Who Killed Berta Cáceres?’

30th July 2020

Ever wonder who the pink boat in Oxford Circus was named after? Berta Cáceres was a Lenca from Honduras who won the prestigious Goldman Prize. She was subsequently murdered in her own home for resisting work on the Agua Zarca dam. The Writers Rebel podcast focuses on indigenous environmental defenders this episode, and […]

Read: Q&A With Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’ Author James CantonJames Canton

30th July 2020

Your new book is about a very special tree and – perhaps – it’s also about our relationship to time, human time versus ‘nature time’? Could you tell us a bit more about what inspired you to write it? Has your relationship with this tree changed the way you perceive other trees? Can you […]