Comma Press online: Resist with Bidisha, Zoe Lambert and Jo Blackman

Manchester-based Comma Press is joining forces with Libraries Sheffield to present this free online panel event bringing together three of the contributors to the anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising. Marking a year since it was launched at Manchester Literature Festival, and the publication of its new paperback edition, the discussion will focus on women’s rebellion through the ages, featuring two of the chapters in particular.

Resist: Stories of Uprising charts two millennia of British resistance, re-imagining 20 historic acts of defiance from a grassroots perspective.

The follow-up to Comma’s successful Protest: Stories of Resistance anthology, which came out in 2017, last year’s Resist: Stories of Uprising charts two millennia of British resistance, re-imagining 20 historic acts of defiance from a grassroots perspective. Think campaigns to change unjust laws, protests against unlawful acts, uprisings both successful and unsuccessful – from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the people of London’s East End halted the march of Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts through the streets of Stepney, to the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, still fresh in our minds with the public inquiry ongoing.

Twenty authors, ranging from Kamila Shamsie to Eley Williams, were teamed with historians, activists and, in some cases, eye witnesses to collaborate on the essays and fictional stories in the collection. This event will see filmmaker and journalist Bidisha discuss her piece, Boudica’s Rising (60AD), which she researched alongside Professor Richard Hingley, plus author Zoe Lambert and historical consultant Jo Blackman talking about their piece inspired by the Seeds of Hope protest at BAe Warton Aerodrome near Preston in 1996, when four women were arrested and imprisoned (and later acquitted) after damaging a fighter jet bound for the illegally occupied country of East Timor.

Bidisha is a writer, TV and radio broadcaster and film-maker. Her most recent book is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices, based on her outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees, and her most recent film is the critically acclaimed An Impossible Poison. A lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Zoe Lambert’s first short story collection, The War Tour, was published by Comma Press, and her stories have recently appeared in Confingo, Litro and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Zoe’s Resist collaborator Jo Blackman has worked as a community project manager, an elected independent councillor and an adult education tutor, and she campaigns for human rights, democratic accountability and sustainability, including with Extinction Rebellion.

Register for free via Eventbrite and you will receive a Zoom link nearer the date.