Listen to acclaimed novelist and lifelong activist Sarah Winman speak passionately about our obligation to act on the climate emergency in this short but punchy interview, recorded following her performance of US inauguaral poet Amanda Gorman’s poem Earth Rise. Watch Sarah’s compelling performance here. Or click here to see the entire festival – with […]
Read More… from “There is no rehearsal, the time is now” – Sarah Winman at THE ANTIDOTE
Here’s acclaimed activist, writer and founder-member of our Writers Rebel clan Alex Lockwood, with a clarion call to action. We’ve vanishingly little time left to mitigate against the worst case climate scenarios so if you’re waiting for your time to act: your time is now. Alex wrote The Chernobyl Privileges, a story of […]
Today’s interview is with Nikita Gill, who mesmerised our ANTIDOTE crowd with three poems that find extraordinary in the everyday. She read out her Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse. What are yours? Watch Nikita’s full performance here. Or click here to see the entire festival – with contributions from eminent writers, poets and […]
Read More… from “Hope is a group project” – Nikita Gill at The Antidote
Listen to the impassioned interview from Zena Edwards following her performance at THE ANTIDOTE, Writers Rebel’s street literature festival. Zena asked us: “are WE the endangered species?”. Her bold performance suggested we use imagination as a vaccine to the climate emergency. Here’s more: You can watch Zena’s full performance here. Or click […]
Read More… from “Are WE the endangered species?” Zena Edwards at the Antidote
Here’s Lemn Sissay, OBE, official poet of the London Olympics and all-round legend, at Tate Modern in London on Friday 15 April 2022. He’d just come off stage after giving an amazing, inspiring performance for THE ANTIDOTE, a rebellious literary street festival held during the April 2022 Rebellion. You can watch Lemn’s full […]
Read More… from Lemn Sissay OBE for Writers Rebel’s The Antidote
Behind the missiles, bombs and bullets raining down on Ukraine lie fossil fuels. The rich world’s addiction to perpetual energy is financing a dictator’s war. The Ukrainians fleeing home and those who’ve stayed to fight are at the mercy of a twisted economic system. As the oil pumps, the blood spills. Oil and gas […]
Read More… from As the Oil Pumps, the Blood SpillsStephen Young
Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist, known as @ClimateHuman on Twitter, founder of ClimateAd and a number of other organisations responding to the climate crisis. Last week he was arrested with Scientist Rebellion. Yesterday (Tuesday 12th April 2022) he spoke at the a launch event of the new A22 global climate change civil resistance […]
Read More… from Satisfying, empowering, life-affirming: civil disobediencePeter Kalmus
Professor Maggie Gee speaks to Writers Rebel’s Sharon Eckman about her new book The Red Children, released today, and how it might inspire wider understanding and action around climate change. Read on for some extracts from the book. SE: You said that you wanted to write an ‘upbeat, funny novel’ about climate change, which […]
This interview took place on Thursday 24th March 2022. The wonderful Margaret Atwood was in London for an event at the Royal Festival Hall, promoting Burning Questions, her new book of essays and occasional pieces. She spoke with Toby Litt, editor of the Writers Rebel website. TL: Thank you for talking to us. […]
There is a place where the river meets the land; a kink in the direction of the water, so that the usually tranquil current froths to a restless swirl, and things wash up onto the grass like bad food spat out. For the past two weeks we have been pulling bodies from that place […]
Read More… from What We Find in the Guts of the Bodies that the River Gives UsPhilip Webb Gregg
Bombs are falling on Kiev in a war whose outcome could bring unimaginable consequences. As if the environmental crisis were not dangerous enough for life on Earth, we must wonder: is humanity incapable of mastering its own demons? We have been blessed with an amazing planet born 4.5 billion years ago; a small fireball […]
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 […]