Watch: Zadie Smith on grief, protest and liesZadie Smith

  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 […]

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Read: Green GuiltAnouchka Grose

  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 […]

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Read: A dispatch from the French AlpsNatasha Randall

  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 […]

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

  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 […]

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Feral in the BurbsSir Simon Schama

  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 […]

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Read: Animal EdenZakia Carpenter-Hall

  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 […]

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

  ‘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 […]

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Read: William Morris and the Art of DissentClare Conway

  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 […]

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

   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 […]

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

  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 […]

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Read: For a Coming ExtinctionPascale Petit

  For a Coming Extinction   (after W. S. Merwin)     You whom we have named Charger, Challenger, Great King, and Noor the shining one,   now that you are at the brink of extinction, I am writing to those of you   who have reached the black groves of the sky, where you […]

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Listen: Twenty Four Splashes of DenialRuth Padel

    XRWRITERSREBEL · Twenty Four Splashes Of Denial by Ruth Padel   Ruth Padel is a poet, novelist and non-fiction author, Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She has published a novel focusing on wildlife in India, and a range of non-fiction […]

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Read: Derail The Mayan TrainHomero Aridjis

  This blog was originally published on July 9th 2020. This week, on his first trip abroad as Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is meeting  with Donald Trump in Washington, presumably to celebrate the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, an updated version of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. This visit has been harshly criticized […]

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Read: Where Are Their Cats? Jessica Townsend

  I remember the moment of panic on the tube as it clattered towards Waterloo. Was I really going to go through with this? I was in my mid-fifties, a grandmother to two, and I had agreed to be part of a topless protest on Waterloo Bridge. What was I thinking? Let’s begin with the easy […]

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Read: On Being a Conscious EvolutionaryManda Scott

  The world is holding its breath.  We are in lockdown, each of us caught somewhere along the spectrum between hell and heaven and the sense of waiting pushes down on my shoulders and steals my breath.  If I go up the hill to ask What do you want of me? (I live on the […]

Read More… from Read: On Being a Conscious EvolutionaryManda Scott