I have a confession to make. I’m a world class procrastinator. A heavyweight champion faffer-abouter. An Olympic standard timewaster. (This isn’t the confession. I’m just setting the scene.) It’s not great. It drives my friends and family nuts. It’s of practically no use in a climate and ecological emergency, which is all about acting […]
We don’t wake up at 5:14am and check the news to see if we’re at nuclear war. We don’t go back to sleep. We don’t read Putin-expert Fiona Hill’s article ‘Yes, He Would’. We don’t blame friends for dropping out of WhatsApp groups (we can’t, they’ve left). We don’t spend an hour leaving Google […]
I was born in New York in 1960, an era when people—Americans, especially—still believed in the modern. My grandparents were wild about gadgets: at Sunday lunch, my father’s father—whose teasing always carried a whiff of terror—liked to chase his grandchildren with his electric carving knife; when we went to stay with my maternal grandmother, […]
Amitav Ghosh is an influential Indian writer and environmental thinker who has won many honours for his fiction. A former academic, he’s the author of several substantial works of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement, an exploration of literature’s failure to address the climate and ecological emergency. His new work, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in […]
Read More… from Listen: Parables of Nutmegs and GenocideAmitav Ghosh
7.9 inches of rain fell in Central Park last night dead cicadas on the crosswalk their bodies bunched in brittle knots sticky candy sky bright with grief branches submerged by the weight of our silence a letter unread a door closed firmly & […]
Read More… from The Month of Emergencies – poemRebecca Faulkner
Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends on whether you are there already, on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns, on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky really can make all location moot […]
The Great Barrier Reef diver/cameraman ‘cried in my mask’, to see the bleaching. Mankind is beginning to take creaky baby steps towards being able to live forever. Just when there’s no more forever to live in. There is a shock that sidles from the phrase ‘humans were rare,’ as applied to time in […]
Phil Kingston, 85, was one of three Christians on trial in January 2021 after they stopped a train at Shadwell Station in London in 2019. Two people stood on top of the train while Phil superglued himself to the side of the train. All three were acquitted. Here are some extracts from the defence […]
Read More… from Shadwell Three: Phil Kingston’s Defence StatementPhil Kingston
A vicar, a priest and an elderly former probation officer sat on a train. Not in a train, you understand: on it. It sounds like the beginning of a joke but it’s not. Far from it. These are the facts that were established at the beginning of a court case in which three people […]
Read More… from The Vicar, The Priest and The Former Probation OfficerJessica Townsend
Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country, which in her home of Australia won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. The novel then won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award Science Fiction Book of the Year. Here she discusses with Alex Lockwood […]
Yesterday, large parts of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill were voted down by the House of Lords, with peers raising many objections to its vision of a tougher approach to protest in Britain. Now the Commons will have another chance to debate the Bill. The process surrounding this Bill has been anti-democratic […]
Read More… from Protest Policing – From the InsideAlice O'Keeffe
It happened on the 8.10 from Euston to Manchester Piccadilly. It was a Tuesday in February 2019. The train was zooming through the outskirts of London. The carriage smelled of aftershave and Costa coffee, there was the tap-tap of laptop keyboards and pre-work chitchat as normal people headed to normal meetings. I was going […]
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
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 […]
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