Everyone is welcome to attend the last scheduled R/GM work-in-progress session of the academic year.
In this session James Miller would like to discuss his current project, ‘Act Now: Inside Extinction Rebellion’ from which he has shared a draft chapter ‘Tell the Truth’. James will introduce and read a section from his chapter, and will show and talk to some images during the session.
James’s introduction to his work:
Writers Rebel is an activist group formed in summer 2019 by the writers Liz Jensen, Monique Roffey, Chloe Aridjis, Jessica Townsend and James Miller with Toby Litt, Paul Ewen, Alex Lockwood and Natasha Walters also joining shortly after. The idea behind the group was to get more writers talking about the climate emergency.
The group affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and has since staged numerous events and actions. Foremost amongst these was an action in Trafalgar Square as part of the 2019 rebellion that saw 40 of the UK's leading writers reading work about nature and the climate emergency and several actions outside Tufton Street, home to many lobby groups that have a nefarious influence on our politics and media, working to undermine meaningful action on climate.
The attached is a draft account of the first of these actions, where we staged a literary festival outside the offices of the Global Warming Policy foundation with George Monbiot, Caroline Lucas and Zadie Smith among those who took part. The event ended with Jessica Townsend and XR co-founder Clare Farrell spraying lies lies lies over the offices and getting nicked. I've been toying with writing a wider history of the movement - but I'm not a non-fiction writer and have largely stalled/ run out of enthusiasm - any thoughts or input would be appreciated. Writers Rebel has largely 'stopped' now due to the draconian new legislation that has effectively criminalised all protest but still runs as an active blog publishing new work by a range of writers on environmental themes.
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