Resist: Stories of Uprising at Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
From Boudica to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Peterloo to the protests following the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017, key moments of British resistance are taken as the starting point for the short fiction in Comma Press anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising. Re-imagining events through the eyes of those involved at a grassroots level, rather than the way history remembers or records, the stories – by the likes of Zoe Lambert, Eley Williams and Kamila Shamsie – were created after each author teamed up with a historian or expert on the subject.
As part of the Northern Short Story Festival Frightfest mini festival taking place throughout October in Leeds, this event will see Kimberly Campanello (lecturer in Creative Writings at the University of Leeds) host readings by two of the contributors. SJ Bradley’s story (with input from Prof John Walter) is based on the Enslow Hill Rising which took place in Oxfordshire in 1596, when a gathering of impoverished men who had fallen on hard times following a bad harvest were captured and tortured for daring to assemble. Gaia Holmes’s story (with with Dr Chris Cocking) is based on the Newbury bypass protest of 1996, when protesters occupied trees on the route of the newly built road which threatened hundreds of acres of woodland.
