The walk had started cheerfully enough. We gathered in the village square, formed a polite circle and introduced ourselves. Many of those who turned up already knew one another, veterans of the Right to Roam campaign. Many had been involved in organizing the protests that had taken place earlier in the year against […]
The shrieking of the young woman covered in fake blood had a visceral effect on me. She’s the same age as my daughter I thought, as the TV presenter thrust her microphone into my face. Like spectators in a Roman amphitheatre watching cowering Christians, the crowd of protesters pushed forward expectantly as if sensing […]
On 21 July, the whale activist Paul Watson docked to refuel his ship, the John Paul DeJoira, in Nuuk, Greenland. And in response, Denmark – of which Greenland is a part – did something morally incomprehensible. It ordered police to arrest and detain him. What was his crime? Watson, the former Greenpeace activist […]
“You have to be very lucky to see a snake,” Sam said to me. “They are shy.” I was pulling on long gum boots to wear for a hike in the forest. Sam is the resident guide at a small guesthouse, set deep inside a forest in Wayanad, in the northern hills of Kerala. […]
She knew that there were other parents in the streets nearby silently planning their terror runs, just like her, just then. This was reassuring, like a superstition, or a community. Hot magic-blue night. She said, ‘Whisper.’ ‘What if I’m scared?’ whispered Vito, who was eight. ‘Of the insects, maybe?’ ‘There is nothing to be […]
Briefly Very Beautiful, set in the near future in a country that is never named as Britain, involves some bold world-building choices. Which of these were the easiest to make, and which the hardest? Those choices were quite straightforward. I was drawing logical conclusions from existing conditions. If this, then this. If fire, then […]
Read More… from Q&A with Roz DineenLiz Jensen and Natasha Walter
It’s not unethical to buy one, despite what some people say. Sure, there’s too much plastic in the world, too much material, too many petrochemicals, but no one has told us definitively that it’s not OK. They would have banned them, anyway. It’s completely fine if you want to walk to the hypermarket to […]
All these images, I cannot shelter from, as one might shelter from the rain. They fall and fall, and fall and fall, in perfect, perfect liquid lines. Things go, they burn out brightly, they reach the surface of my mind. The weather, the people, at the edges, bordering what goes on between and behind. […]
We marched, that day, towards the Houses of Parliament, leaving the square outside the Tate Britain and forming a procession along the Thames. Someone had brought branches to the protest, green and freshly coppiced from a managed wood, and we held them aloft like we were extras from Macbeth, converging on Dunsinane. As a line of […]
Read More… from You Can’t Kill the MessageAmber Massie-Blomfield
You think that the dead watch over you all the time, that whenever you pick your nose, or lose it with the kids and shout something you know you’ll regret, we’re hovering at attic height, being silently, ostentatiously (and hypocritically) censorious. You think that as soon as we die, we’re cleansed of all that […]
Emissaries from the Postworld: Account F One day a flower appeared where nothing ever was before. It had been so long since any one of us had seen a thing we weren’t sure what to call it at first. Um, one said. A-hem, another said. Until one of us arrived at the word: […]
Read More… from Emissaries from the PostworldKatharine Haake
A couple of days ago, our editor Toby Litt published a poem on his Substack, A Writer’s Diary. It was a response to criticisms of the Fossil Free Books campaign. Since then, the controversy over Fossil Free Books has become even more divisive. Many but definitely not all of the members of Writers Rebel […]
Read More… from On the Fossil Free Books ControversyToby Litt
The herring came in on Tuesday, pulsing into Mud Bay with the tide, heralded by flocks of gulls and roaring sea lions. The run occurs in a flash, like their iridescent bodies catching sunlight as the school shifts in unison to evade a predator. Herring run when the water temperature is just right. Females […]
Read More… from The Herring, the Whale and the Mining ExecutiveShannon Kelly Donahue
The winning entry in our flash fiction competition, ‘The Road is Long’, weaves threads of grief, resilience and hope into a haunting piece of poetic prose. The judges unanimously agreed it deserved to win, and we hope you are equally moved and inspired by it. Charlie is a voice artist and writer living […]
This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition. An empty coke bottle is tossed on a beach in California and takes the Current south toward Mexico. There, it hops the North Equatorial, crossing the Pacific. Near the coast of Japan, it travels north on the powerful Kuroshiro Current. Deflated, it […]
This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition. Alycia Calvert is a neurodivergent emerging author from the desert southwest. Her lush little stories blur the line between poetry and fiction and always have a speculative bent. Alycia Calvert writes: “I’ve been thinking about the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial […]
This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition. The first day after his life ended, Martin Willoughby simply lay full-length on the kitchen floor staring at the ceiling, clutching his bright yellow safety vest. The walls were now a few eighths of an inch thicker with the insulation that had […]
This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition. Daddy said, help me bury it. So I stood, rain plicking off my hood, watching him steam with the spade in the hole. Come on then, he said, and I cast in the dirt I’d clawed up, already a wet clod in […]
This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition. Jane finds it cooler under the greenhouses hanging tree limbs, as the ground outside browns. Holding hands or alone, others join. Under metal and glass, heavy breathing in the sweaty humidity. Outside, tan grasses crisp. Emptied aquifers become blistering, caving sinkholes. Sheets […]
Firstly, many congratulations on Any Human Power – what an extraordinary, multi-layered, wild and ultimately hopeful read. It’s described as Thrutopian fiction – could you explain what that is, and how the concept of Thrutopia first came about? Thank you – this is always a good place to start. The word ‘Thrutopia’ came from […]
It’s 1993. I am six. Outside my window, the crumbling mills of Blackburn stretch to the horizon. Grass verges paint broken lines down the edges of tarmac pavements. Mr. Barlow’s hedge stands boxy and prim. The occasional battered old car hums its way up the street from the CD factory, where the grown-ups work. Sometimes, […]