The write way to fight
A protest against BP at the National Portrait Gallery in London CREDIT: Jamie Lowe
WHEN WRITERS REBEL (WR) formed to become Extinction Rebellion’s (XR’s) literary wing in the summer of 2019, our aim was to put literature in the service of the threatened ecosystems that sustain us.
One of our inspirations was the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement, which criticised literary fiction’s failure to address climate and ecological breakdown.
“It’s our job, as writers, to make imaginative leaps on behalf of those who don’t, can’t or won’t,” he wrote.
His book unsettled me. He was right that most fiction wasn’t rising to the occasion, but I wanted him to be wrong.
Then, in the early summer of 2019, I spotted a tweet by novelist Monique Roffey asking if there were any other writers concerned about the climate and the ecological emergency. I responded – and so did the novelist and academic James Miller.
