As a Christmas gift, from Writers Rebel to you, all the five chapters of the writing manual that Toby Litt wrote for Writers Rebel are here, downloadable as a pdf. How to Tell a Story to Save the World by Toby Litt for Writers Rebel […]
Read More… from How to Tell a Story to Save the WorldToby Litt
Do you remember the 2016 news story about the baby dolphin washed up on an Argentinian beach? Rather than help it, dozens of tourists at the Santa Teresita beach resort simply took selfies with it. The saddest image was the final one: the dolphin’s corpse left discarded on the beach after it succumbed to […]
Read More… from Dolphins don’t just die in other placesHarry Eckman
Can you tell us a little more about the anthology ‘Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate Emergency’ why and how did it come about? Was there any particular ‘trigger’ that compelled you to edit this collection? 2021 has been such a pivotal year for the planet, and it brought together many key events […]
Read More… from Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate EmergencyKate Simpson
Opposite the window where I type is a tree I have no name for. In summer, its fuchsia pink tendrils droop over the pavement like a flamboyant feather duster. I think of it often: the arbour beneath those arching branches, the gap in my mind where a name should be. In 2015, Sheffield’s street […]
Mum spent a lot of time at Grandad’s house that summer; she always sighed before she went. Sometimes, she’d be half-out of the door, car keys in hand, and I’d make a coffee and she’d sit down again. As if she’d never intended to go. It’s difficult, she’d say. The summer light would glow […]
Read More… from Some Things Are Not Nothing – Short StoryLyndsay Wheble
Wherever there is the potential for planting, I will garden. Whether it’s in a pot or on a balcony, or in my own dear garden which I’ve been raking and sowing since March. I write about the garden in a weekly mailing list, Pond Tales, chronicling the antics of the frogs and birds. However, […]
Read More… from Lost landscapes and the grief of nature’s tessellationsJasmin Kirkbride
The globally-resonant word ‘cantadora’ is a play on the Spanish/Italian/Portuguese word ‘cantador,’ meaning singer. Part of an ancient oral tradition, it refers to storytelling that arises from personal and collective history. In the many landscapes that have shaped me as a human, and as an artist, I have found and experienced cantadora again and […]
Read More… from Cantadora and the Path of HopeWhitney McVeigh
Your first collection of short stories, Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo, 2021), is very much about the contemporary moment. Issues of displacement and accelerating change run throughout it. It’s a brilliantly unsettling book. What effect were you hoping the stories would have on their readers? I hope that the readers will be able to rest in the ambiguity […]
May I start with one point of law. I wish to dispute the claim by the Prosecution that our action does not meet the criterion of addressing an ‘imminent’ threat to life. It is well-established in English law that ‘imminence’ does not only mean ‘that very night’ or the like. The classic example is […]
Whenever I hear an interviewer or journalist say; ‘We know all about the climate crisis but why are you disrupting the ordinary people of Britain?’ I know that they have seen some headlines and they have probably read a few articles, but they don’t know about the crisis. Not really. If they had […]
Read More… from Jessica Townsend’s Court StatementJessica Townsend
What do we mean by ‘Big Oil’ anyway? It’s the umbrella term for BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Total, the world’s six largest and richest publicly-traded oil and natural gas producers. Then there’s OPEC. An intergovernmental organisation set up in 1960 by five of the world’s largest oil producing countries, it co-ordinates the […]
The beginning of each book is often so distant from its end. I began my first book thinking I was writing a history of the river Indus. But when I eventually arrived in Pakistan, the Indus river’s ecological present burst onto its pages. Water, the lack of it—and the impossibility of sharing it equitably—was […]
It’s February and my husband and I move into our new house in Norwich, where we moved eighteen months ago from London seeking slower, wider skies. Before the paint’s dry or the boxes unpacked we’re out in the garden. We’ve longed for a patch of green to call our own for years. Neighbours tell […]
“UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” -The Once-ler Rarely do words from children’s books sear themselves into my memory like this warning by the faceless Once-ler in Dr. Seuss’s classic The Lorax. The once-destructive (now regretful) protagonist issues this warning to the […]
I had to stop watching the mainstream news. I turned off my notifications, stopped doom-scrolling. I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears. My heart couldn’t take any more, it was breaking with shame and anger, guilt and despair at what my fellow humans are doing to each other, to our planet. […]
It has taken 3.5 billion years of life for this planet to evolve into its present beauty and complexity. Yet it has only taken my lifetime for half the carbon emissions now present to appear in the atmosphere. Today everything alive on our miraculous Earth is under threat. Yet there is a plan, which […]
Writers Rebel is delighted to be able to publish an exclusive excerpt from Venetia Welby’s new novel, Dreamtime. ‘So, where is he then, your dad?’ Carter’s hand is creeping towards her bony hip. Very illicit. ‘Won’t he come to your Family Week?’ Sol does not answer. She thinks about how Carter sold his […]
Writers Rebel is thrilled to publish an excerpt from Lucy Jones’ book, Losing Eden. In 2007, the words ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ were taken out of the Oxford Children’s Dictionary, in favour of words like ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’ to reflect changing usage of the language. ‘Hamster’, ‘heron’, ‘herring’, ‘king sher’, ‘lark’, ‘leopard’, […]
Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement was published in 2016. It’s a moving polemic, accusing contemporary novelists of failing to find the right forms, or the necessary urgency, in addressing the climate crisis. And it’s a crucial intervention. Which novelist hasn’t been anguished by this widening gap, like a chasm opening under our own […]
In this final couple of chapters, we find some signs of resistance to the dominance of Heroism in two of the most successful films of all time. AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR 2018 and AVENGERS: ENDGAME 2019 Unlikely as it may seem, the two recent Avengers films give signs of possible hope. (I’m going […]
Read More… from How to Tell a Story to Save the World 5Toby Litt
This is an edited version of a speech given to XR Scientists at the Science Museum on 29th August 2021 My name is Emma. I am a Research Fellow at Cambridge University looking at behaviour change and sustainable diets. But I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I’ve been asked to speak today […]
Read More… from They have given us no reason to trust themEmma Garnett