During the recent Rebellion we lost an inspirational friend and ally, David Graeber. This Sunday, 11 October 2020, sees an Intergalactic Memorial Carnival take place in over 100 (and counting) locations around the world – and everyone from XR is invited. Rebels in London can head to Portobello Road, and there are events planned […]
Read More… from Read: We Celebrate the Life of David Graeber
David Graeber
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 More… from Read: Q&A with Diana McCaulay
Diana McCaulay and Monique Roffey
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 More… from Read: In the Shadow of the Storm
Richard Georges
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Read More… from Read: Tufton Street – Fiery Words Under a Police Helicopter
Charlotte Du Cann
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 […]
Read More… from Watch: Paul Hilder lays out the facts of the matter
Paul Hilder
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 […]
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 More… from Watch: Zadie Smith on grief, protest and lies
Zadie Smith
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 More… from Read: A dispatch from the French Alps
Natasha Randall
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 […]
Read More… from Read: Q&A with John McCullough, Hawthornden Prize 2020 winner
John McCullough
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 More… from Read: Blog From the Treetops in the Roald Dahl Woods
Amy Caitlin Pritchard
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 More… from Read: William Morris and the Art of Dissent
Clare Conway
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 […]
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 More… from Listen: Nina Lahkani asks ‘Who Killed Berta Cáceres?’