The Anthology

Issue No. 16

 


Published in 2019 with a foreword by Julia Bell, the sixteenth issue features the following contributors:

Richard Hamblyn

Emma Hutton

Rachel Bower

Katie Willis

Arhondia

Hannah Austin

Rushika Wick

Tarquin Landseer

Carol Caffrey

Louisa Armitage

Season Butler

Dave Wakely

Kate Noakes

Alexandra Petropoulos

Shauna Mackay

Elizabeth Baines

Diego Ferrari

Sarah Barr

Laura Lewis-Waters

M. W. Bewick

Reena Dennhardt

Joshua Southern

Valentine Carter

Andrew Leach

Carmel Shortall

Fran Lock

Judy Darley

Jean McNeil

Emily Hinshelwood

Lawrence Illsley

Ronan Fitzgerald

Lorraine Wilson

K. M. Elkes

“The trouble with climate change is that it’s too big to see.”

The 37 stories, essays and poems in this, the sixteenth issue of The Mechanics’ Institute Review, seek to make climate visible. Through tales that mirror the present – austerity, knife culture, mental stress, weather extremes – and imagine the future – flesh-melting heat, mind-blanking winds, living as a tree; through essays spelling out scientific facts and their omni-impacting consequences, recounting personal experience or questioning the role of literature; and through poetry confronting drought, birth, grief, pollution, policy, portents – and dodos – this anthology makes us see.

Featuring new writing from Richard Hamblyn (The Invention of Clouds), Jean McNeil (Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir) and Fran Lock (Dogtooth), a foreword by Julia Bell, photography by Diego Ferrari and the exceptional voices of both debut and established authors from across the UK, each piece offers a compelling view of what it means to be living in our time, in our particular climate, right now.

Never has the subject of climate been more urgent or inescapable. This collection is a call to arms: to debate, to engage, to empathise, to reconsider what we think we know and to acknowledge that the “climate issue” can no longer be ignored.

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