Liz Jensen's Blog, page 5

Writers Rebel update

On 11th October, the campaigning group Writers Rebel launched in Trafalgar Square as part of Extinction Rebellion’s October Uprising. For news and links, follow us on Twitter WritersRebel @XrRebel or Facebook.

The post Writers Rebel update appeared first on Liz Jensen.

Coming Soon… A Literary Event Like No Other

Top UK Writers join Rebel Protest against the Ecological and Climate Emergency  

40 writers to perform in Trafalgar Square on 11th October as part of XR’s October Uprising The new campaigning group Writers Rebel urges the government to tackle Ecocide and the Climate Emergency Performers include Ali Smith, Naomi Alderman, Helen Simpson, Susie Orbach, Simon Schama, AL Kennedy, Robert Macfarlane, Paul Farley, Daljit Nagra Writers Rebel is born.

The new campaigning group Writers Rebel has ass...

Extinction Rebellion’s October Uprising

Liz is co-organising a ground-breaking literary event in London as part of Extinction Rebellion’s October Uprising… watch this space. #WritersRebel

The post Extinction Rebellion’s October Uprising appeared first on Liz Jensen.

The writing room

The Writing Room is a creative space in Rosenborghus, an old schoolhouse in heart of Copenhagen, hosting intensive writing courses with British novelist Liz Jensen and American playwright and screenwriter, Rhea Leman.

Fiction with Liz Jensen

A 6-week Thursday evening course (6-8.30 pm), September 26 – November 7 with holiday break Oct 17.  Fee: 3500 kroner.

Part masterclass, part workshop, Liz’s dynamic, hands-on class consists of flash fiction exercises, brainstorming, workshopping and disc...

Tiger by Polly Clark review – passionate tale of the wild under threat

In the three years since Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement berated literature for its failure to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, fiction writers have made up for lost time. Indeed cli-fi, once a subset of science fiction, has been so quickly subsumed by realism that its days as a self-contained genre may be numbered.

The mass extinction of species has taken longer to percolate. While threatened ecosystems have sparked an explosion of powerful, elegiac non-fiction by Helen Macdo...

Galore by Michael Crummey – review

“Newfoundland seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real,” notes an American doctor when he first encounters the remote settlement of Paradise Deep.

Read more

The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan review – mermaids and mysteries on a Scottish island

Emotionally, an island is always more than a land-mass surrounded by water. As metaphors, islands can denote freedom, imprisonment and everything in between, while as backdrops, they invite extravagant experiment. When it comes to the latter, Kirsty Logan has form. Her debut novel The Gracekeepers, an environmental fairytale set in a lush, futuristic waterscape, won wide acclaim and comparisons to Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Emily St John Mandel.

Read more

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki – review

If a Japanese-American writer who is also a Zen Buddhist priest wrote a post-Japanese tsunami novel, what themes might you imagine she would address? Biculturalism, water, death, memory, the female predicament, conscience, the nature of time and tide? Tick. All there. Throw in the second world war, the reader-writer relationship, depression, ecological collapse, suicide, origami, a 105-year-old anarchist nun and a schoolgirl’s soiled knickers, and you have Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for...

Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E Kennedy – review

Thanks to television drama, every British TV licence-payer now has a passive acquaintance with Danish, and Copenhagen is at its most globally recognised since Hans Christian Andersen’s day. It seems we can’t get enough of the place.

Read more

House of Ashes by Monique Roffey – the story of an insurrection

Gun-toting rebels seize government buildings, take hostages and appear on state television to announce the overthrow of a “corrupt” regime. The army intervenes, and the insurgents become the heroes of the moment – or its cannon fodder. The BBC arrives. Welcome to the generic coup d’etat.

Read more