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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Read: Where Are Their Cats? Jessica Townsend
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
As I lay in the middle of the road outside Downing Street, surrounded by police, awaiting my imminent arrest, I looked up at a cloudless blue sky. It felt like a sign that the rain had finally stopped and, as I enjoyed the sun on my face, one of London’s famous parakeets flew overhead. […]
Read More… from Read: Tear Gas or Tea? A Very English ArrestBeth Pitts
There was a meme circulating a few months ago which contrasted the competing virtues of Greta Thunberg and the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat as poster children for the climate movement. Both Greta and Boyan are young, idealistic and passionately committed to environmental causes. They were both still teenagers when they first came to public prominence. […]
Read More… from Read: Telling the Story of Climate CrisisPhilip Seargeant
When the sun started shining, earlier in the month, I couldn’t decide whether it made lockdown harder or easier to bear. To begin with, the answer seemed obvious: even people who don’t have a garden or a balcony could still get to a park for their daily exercise, and those that had to self-isolate could […]
Read More… from Read: Floods and Plagues and Other ThingsEdward Platt
I only went to a dog meat market once. If you don’t know what a dog meat market is, it’s exactly as it sounds. It’s where they slaughter and butcher dogs and sell their meat. You can find them throughout Asia – I went to Moran Market in South Korea. As the co-founder of an […]
Read More… from Read: Where Dogs Die, Change is Still PossibleHarry Eckman
Shoulder Season The creature lies still in the villa’s pool, waiting for the day the caretaker rolls back the tarp and the first wasps of the year thrash themselves to stillness. Then they come, writhing on their inflatables, the holidaymakers. It’s not until midweek that the family’s youngest, grown sufficiently bored and appalled, […]
ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? < RANT WRITTEN TO BE READ LOUD WRITERS REBELLION, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, OCTOBER 2019 > THIS IS THE WRITERS REBELLION CALLING! I AM HERE FOR THIS! ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? CALLING ALL MY BOOKISH COMRADES. ALL THE INKY-FINGERED INTROVERTS, THE BESPECTACLED PEN PUSHERS, CALLING ALL WRITERS AND READERS, BOOK LOVERS […]
he says, whose preferred flag is a blank cheque. on mornings made pejorative with foxes. pissy macho stink of them on everything. the grim, diminished sting of drill, its glitchy phobic diss and bleat. stuck on repeat. like foxes. solja boys gekkering thin threat up from behind the wheelie bins. these, our russet buccaneers, sarcoptic […]
Nine months later, and for the first time in my life, I am on trial, for breaching a ‘Section 14’ order intended to clear rebels off the streets. In the dock, I take the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Telling the truth because other people haven’t. The […]
Individualism and spending time alone is base-line normal for writers. We visit friends, we eat with people, we go to parties. But we work alone; get things going alone; get things done alone. Well, alone with our imaginary friends. Sometimes this makes me sad. I look at the long lists of credits at the end […]
As part of the October 2019 Reading Marathon, Zadie Smith – one of the UK’s most important writers – recorded this exclusive and beautiful contribution for us. […]
Read More… from Watch: Elegy for a Country’s SeasonsZadie Smith
This is an exclusive excerpt from Jini Reddy’s new book, Wanderland. ‘In south-west London, trying to make sense of it all – not just my father’s and sister’s deaths, but what felt like a total failure to make anything stick – I’d gravitate like a homing pigeon to Holland Park. It brought me back to […]
Good news has been in short supply — save the reports of frontline heroism, community kindness and spectacular fundraising efforts — since the planet was struck by this meteorite of contagion, smashing into our world with catastrophic consequences. Our spikey sci-fi nemesis, the coronavirus COVID-19, has taken literally incalculable lives: our death-counting systems cannot keep […]
The People of the River Rise reading, hosted by Culture Declares, took place during lockdown on 20 May 2020. It was organised by Paul Ewen and hosted by Toby Litt. The writers who took part were Alfie, Chloe Aridjis, Jeff Goodell, Monique Roffey, Susana Medina, Edward Platt, Clare Morrall, Anoucha Grose, Jessica Townsend, Josh Appignanesi, […]
We were thrilled to get together with Amitav Ghosh to talk about his book The Great Derangement, a seminal work about colonialism, Climate Crisis and much more. It was published in 2015, pre-dating Extinction Rebellion and the Youth Strikes. There follows a discussion with Mothiur Rahman (XR Muslims, Guardianship and Visioning Circles), Ami Amlani (XR […]
Read More… from Listen: Writers Rebel Bookclub with Amitav Ghosh
The second Writers Rebel podcast made in conjunction with Extinction Rebellion contains a feast of stories and poems from the Writers’ Marathon in Trafalgar Square, London (on the 11th of October, 2019). Oh, and we also have an interview with Booker Prize co-winner, and author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Margaret Atwood. We […]
Read More… from Listen: The Birth of Writers Rebel with Margaret Atwood
For our first Writers Rebel Podcast, we talked to the team behind the October Rebellion reading marathon shortly the event – James Miller (Lost Boys and Sunshine State), Monique Roffey (whose novel Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature), and Chloe Aridjis, (who wrote Book of Clouds, and has been awarded a Guggenheim […]
Read More… from Listen: Planning A Literary Rebellion with Jonathan Franzen
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