Before Reform gained control of Essex county council in the May elections, Chris Taylor and members of the Rochford LGBTQ+ community already felt they were witnessing a growing tide of political rhetoric around identity.

But they were still shocked when the county’s new leadership moved to ban Pride events in 74 libraries, scaling back events of “any particular groups or themes”, a decision they said was “straight out of Trumpland”.

“It communicates the fact that we’re not welcome,” said Taylor, who recently launched a petition against the “Orwellian” ban on pride events in Essex libraries.

Reform councils across England, from Essex and Durham to Leicestershire and Kent, have imposed bans on flying the pride flag and holding pride events in public spaces, as well as, in some cases, defunding pride events previously sponsored by local authorities.

Essex county council said libraries were “safe spaces for everybody” and LGBTQ+ books and displays would continue, but added the promotion of library events aimed at specific groups was under review.

Reform councils have stopped flying Pride flags outside civic centres and county halls and restricted council flagpoles exclusively to union, national, county or armed forces flags at council buildings under its control.

Since learning of Essex council’s proposed changes to its libraries, Taylor, 38, has contacted Reform councillors with concerns but has yet to receive a response. With Essex Pride approaching, one LGBTQ+ resident told Taylor they had wanted to attend the library with their child, but expressed safety concerns.

“There does seem to be a bit a resurgence of anti-acceptance toward the community in the area,” added Taylor. “It’s a bit alarming.”

In Sunderland and Gateshead, Reform-led councils have withdrawn funding for Pride events and ended the practice of flying Pride flags on council buildings, while South Tyneside council has restricted the flag’s display at South Shields town hall to a single day at the start of Pride month.

Drew Dalton, an outreach manager at Out North East, which runs Pride events across Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside and recently opened One Centre, the north-east’s first LGBT community centre in Gateshead, said the organisation had been preparing for Reform victories for months.

He said Sunderland and Gateshead’s decisions to stop flying Pride flags, alongside funding cuts, had left the organisation feeling it had lost “money”, “visibility” and “a great number of allies” in council chambers.

Dalton said: “We’ve spent a long time building up relationships and we lost them overnight in the local elections.”

The group has been forced to move events away from council-owned land and venues in anticipation of further restriction, Dalton said. “We had to future-proof everything we were doing,” he said. “It’s become that type of era where you have to watch your step.”

He said concerns within the LGBTQ+ community extended beyond council policy. Promotional signs had been repeatedly torn down for a smaller Pride event supported by the organisation, while people attending the One Centre hub had expressed anxiety about the wider climate.

“I don’t want to paint us as all scared,” he said. “There’s also a lot of righteous anger about what’s going on. And there’s the beginnings, which is wonderful to see, of people starting to pull together.”

Dalton said the political climate was reshaping Pride events. “We’ll probably look back at the latter half of the 2010s as a period when Pride became much more of a party. This year we’re not even having concerts. We’re having a rally in Sunderland. That tells you how the dynamic has shifted.”

Gateshead council, defending the changes, said it would only fly the union flag and St George’s Cross from council buildings but would continue to support civic, cultural and community events.

Wakefield council said it had adopted a more consistent approach focused on civic, national and military service flags, while Kent county council said it did not fly “cause-specific or community campaign flags” on its buildings.

Warwickshire Pride said they had “severely” felt the impact of the Reform administration since the party had won local elections in 2025. “From not permitting the Pride flag to fly, to announcing that Warwickshire Pride should not receive council funding, and this week saying [they] want LGBTQ+ books and information banned from Warwickshire’s libraries and schools, we are seeing hate towards our charity rise as a direct result,” said the charity’s chair, Daniel Browne.

Browne had requested the Pride and Trans flag fly at the county council on behalf of Warwickshire Pride, but was not surprised when the requests were declined. However, when the county council’s chair changed from Reform to Conservative, it was decided the flag would be raised this month.

Reform’s actions have affected the communities they serve, Browne said. The charity’s services include coffee mornings, LGBTQ+ counselling, youth groups and social events, where attenders have said as a direct result of the changes they have experienced increased anxiety, self-harming behaviours and hate incidents.

Browne said: “We’re stretched, under attack ourselves, and that’s difficult to navigate, but we remain here for Warwickshire’s LGBTQ+ population and will continue to push back against attempts to erase us or discriminate against us.”

When Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.

For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before.

“Unfortunately, I did see this coming,” she tells me over a video call from the California offices of the African American Policy Forum, the thinktank she co-founded. We are calling to discuss Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, but the conversation soon shifts. “The fact that they are targeting this … it is because they understand the power of these ideas, the power of this history.” Behind her, posters reading “History repeats when we forget” and “The freedom to learn is the freedom to live” hang alongside shelves of critical race theory texts and Black history books the likes of which have, in some states, become politically radioactive.

What makes the intensity of this backlash striking is how recently Crenshaw’s work entered mainstream public consciousness. Until a few years ago, ideas such as intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of legal scholarship, academic debate and activist vernacular. It wasn’t until 2020, when a loose coalition of conservative activists, media figures and politicians began elevating them as political flashpoints, that they were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this snowballed into all-out war against “woke”, with critical race theory as its ultimate bogeyman. It became a byword for liberal overreach, a catch-all for everything that was wrong with the US in the eyes of the conservative right.

“Trump jumped on a bandwagon started by a few rightwing propagandists, claiming that intersectionality and critical race theory were anti-white, anti-male and anti-American,” she says. “Fox News amplified this, and within weeks, these ideas were mentioned more than they had been in the previous four decades.”

Crenshaw, true to form, is not shy about naming what she considers to be the problem. “One of the keys of fascism is control of the nation’s narrative,” she says. “That, alongside creating a group of people that are legitimate targets of exclusion – an us and them – allows for the autocrat to be seen as the embodiment of the essential nation. And in the United States, we come prefabricated for that dimension of fascism to set into our politics.

“Why is it that so many white Americans are willing to continue to vote for a president that is demolishing democracy, so long as he’s willing to affirm them effectively as true Americans?” she continues. “Because of the idea that those over there are different from us. They don’t really belong. That is the way fascism works.”

It is clearly in Crenshaw’s DNA to confront injustice, as is evidenced in Backtalker, which chronicles her journey from witnessing inequality as a child to challenging entrenched power structures in law, academia and politics. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes. “There is BS that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second‑class status as the price of belonging sickens me.”

Born in Ohio in 1959, on the verge of the civil rights movement, Crenshaw grew up at a time of expanding yet restricted possibilities. She watched that tension unfolding in real time, in the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr on television, and in discussions around the kitchen table, where her parents, dedicated anti-racist activists, treated politics as a daily practice. “As a Black child, I had early inklings that differences would matter in my life, even if I couldn’t name them,” she says.

One such inkling came when her family moved to the predominantly white suburb of Canton, Ohio. “When we arrived, there were children playing everywhere,” she remembers. “I was excited.” But almost overnight, the children vanished. Neighbours treated the new family as intruders and shouted slurs when they walked by; an estate agent knocked on their door urging a quick sale.

Perhaps the most formative incident came when she was five years old, and was the only girl in her all‑white class who was not given the opportunity to play the princess, Thorn Rosa, in a school performance. “Thorn Rosa marks the stirring of my nascent awareness that my colour and my girlness were linked,” she writes.

“You push that doubt down until something happens that forces it open,” she tells me. “You realise that how others see you will shape your experiences. And that realisation is traumatic.”

What mattered, she says, was that those moments were not dismissed. “I credit my parents for taking them seriously,” she says. “They refused to minimise what I experienced, even as a young child. That affirmation was freeing, it told me my feelings were grounded in reality and gave me permission to understand them.”

It was tragedy that would, in many ways, become the making of the young Crenshaw. She was eight years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968 – a before-and-after moment in her life. The following day, young Black activists in Canton directed schoolchildren to the local church for a hastily organised memorial service. Crowded into pews, everyone was silent when the activists asked if anyone had anything to say about Dr King. No one moved. It was Crenshaw who broke the silence, exhorting the crowd not to let his death be the end of the freedom struggle. “We pick up where he left off,” she recalls saying. “We continue to walk in his footsteps. They can’t kill his dream for us – not if we won’t let them.”

Further devastation followed. A year later, her father, an apparently healthy 34-year-old, died suddenly, leaving the family reeling. Not long after, her older brother Mantel was shot and killed while at university. The circumstances were never fully explained, and justice never came. She writes of that period with unflinching candour: “Happiness was dead.” These losses left an indelible mark, sharpening her awareness of the unevenness of justice in a world already structured by racial and social inequities.

Crenshaw arrived at Cornell University in 1978, to a campus shaped by the afterlives of civil rights struggle and Black student organising. It was there that she entered into a relationship with a fellow student that became physically abusive. In one incident, he beat her and tried to throw her from the window of her 10th-floor dorm room.

“We were eye-to-eye when he threw the first punch,” she writes in Backtalker. “Pressed out of denial, I woke to the fact that he was going to beat the daylights out of me.”

What followed unsettled her understanding of community more profoundly than the violence itself. Rather than rallying around her, many of her peers – fellow Black students and friends – closed ranks around him. To involve authorities, they told her, would be to expose a Black man to a system already predisposed against him. The implication was that her suffering as a woman should be subordinated to a broader racial solidarity.

“The way that sexual violence against Black women has long been justified – framing us as unlikely ever to say no to any sexual encounter – you can know this historically, but then when you experience it interpersonally, you have to grapple with the fact that more people in your own community will come to the defence of your abuser than you,” she says. “It really presses the question of ‘what is solidarity supposed to look like?’” she continues. “What does it mean to defend the ‘we’, when that ‘we’ often excludes me?”

Crenshaw returns to that question – of the instability of “we”– again and again. From arriving at Harvard Law School and being called the N-word on her first day, to being directed to enter the university’s exclusive Fly Club through the back door because she was a woman – the Black male friends she was with, rather than challenge the slight, urged her not to make a scene. What she would later call “asymmetrical solidarities” revealed themselves in practice: loyalty expected but not returned. “I cannot bring myself to ride or die for a politics that won’t ride or die for me,” she writes of the incident.

In legal terms, the problem came into focus when Crenshaw came across a 1976 case in which an African American woman was denied the ability to bring a discrimination claim against her employer on the grounds that the law could recognise race or gender, but not both at once. Her experience – specifically of being discriminated against as a Black woman – fell through the cracks and the case was thrown out of court. In 1989, Crenshaw identified this form of compound discrimination and gave it a name: intersectionality. Around the same time, she was part of a group of scholars developing what would become critical race theory, a broader attempt to understand how racism is a structural part of the legal system.

It is a lesson that would resurface, years later, in a very different arena. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the language of “we” returned with renewed force – this time, as a promise. For many, Obama’s election felt like a rupture with the past. But for Crenshaw, it quickly raised a familiar question.

“I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime,” she says, of that initial hope after Obama’s victory. “It felt like a miracle. My mother and I celebrated together on the phone – I was dancing on a table at Stanford and she was doing the same in her retirement facility. For her especially, it was a dream come true.”

But symbolism, Crenshaw suggests, has limits, particularly when it is used as a substitute for structural change. She found his reticence to address racial injustice head-on frustrating. Very quickly, the terms of Obama’s political viability became clear.

“He had been framed as post-racial, beyond these issues,” she says. “And that framing became a constraint on what he could say and how directly he could address racial injustice.”

Even when Obama did address racial inequality more explicitly in his second term – most notably after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 – the focus, she felt, remained narrow. The White House’s response, My Brother’s Keeper, was launched as a nationwide initiative to expand opportunities for Black boys and young men. Its intentions were widely praised. Crenshaw was not convinced, and she took the administration to task directly.

“What was being discussed – Black boys and boys of colour– while important, came at the expense of girls,” Crenshaw says. “Black girls and girls of colour were suffering many of the same issues.”

Through the African American Policy Forum, she launched the #WhyWeCantWait campaign, calling for the programme to be expanded to include girls and young women of colour. Prominent Black feminist leaders and advocates including Brittney Cooper, Barbara Arnwine, Lisalyn Jacobs and Fatima Goss Graves threw their support behind it. An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 women and girls, urged the administration to realign the initiative with the principles of inclusion and shared fate that had long underpinned struggles for racial justice. The groundswell widened further with a second petition backed by high-profile white feminists including Gloria Steinem, V (formerly Eve Ensler) and Jane Fonda.

Crenshaw was invited to the White House to discuss the initiative, but the encounter only underscored how little space there was for the argument she was making. She recalls being interrupted by Obama’s chief of staff, who, she says, incredibly, told her she perhaps didn’t understand the meaning of intersectionality. Afterwards, she found herself shut out of the administration.

“It was uncomfortable to find myself outside the flow of support,” she says. “I never liked being at odds with my community. But if speaking out means sometimes being at odds with people I love, well, so be it. I still love them. I hope they still love me.”

More recently, though, the backtalking has not been against people she loves. The whiplash between the 44th and 45th presidents – the cautious optimism of Obama and the aggressive rollback under Trump – made that unavoidable.

Since 2020, the backlash has metastasised, Crenshaw argues, into an all-out assault not just on ideas, but on the very existence of Black people and women in positions of authority. “Our very presence in power is treated as preferential treatment,” she says. “This narrative of reverse discrimination has been central to the attack from the start.”

In response, she has not retreated but doubled down on her work with the African American Policy Forum, mobilising coalitions, supporting grassroots activists and amplifying voices that challenge the distortion and erasure of race and gender in public life. She continues to insist that the frameworks she helped build are necessary for understanding how inequality operates today.

This febrile political climate has brought a rising tide of political violence into everyday life in the US. The 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the assassination attempts on Trump, the 2025 targeted killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. I ask her whether her physical safety is now something she worries about. She demurs.

“There’s a long history in this country of using the threat of violence to keep people under heel,” she says. “The civil rights movement succeeded despite that terror. One cannot ignore that history. One cannot think that those forces that are willing to break this country rather than share it, don’t have descendants who won’t carry forward the same ideas.

“So yes, it’s a reality, and of course I take steps to be safe,” she continues. “But that is the cost of backtalking to the forces of autocracy.”

John Lithgow has called JK Rowling’s views on transgender rights “ironic and inexplicable”, saying that backlash to his decision to play Albus Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter series “upsets me”.

Speaking on stage at Rotterdam film festival after a screening of his latest film, Jimpa, the 80-year-old actor was asked about how he felt about Rowling’s views. Rowling serves as an executive producer on the upcoming series, which is being produced by HBO and will be one of the most expensively produced television shows of all time.

“I take the subject extremely seriously,” Lithgow told the audience, reported by the Hollywood Reporter. “JK Rowling has created this amazing canon for young people, young kids’ literature that has jumped into the consciousness of society. Young and old people love Harry Potter and the Harry Potter stories. It’s so much about acceptance. It’s about good versus evil. It’s about kindness versus cruelty. It’s deeply felt.”

“I find it ironic and somewhat inexplicable that Rowling has expressed such views,” he added. “I’ve read about them, and I’ve never met her. She’s not really involved in this production at all. The people who are re-adapting Harry Potter and turning it into an eight-year-long TV series are remarkable. … These are people I really want to work with.”

“It upsets me when people are vehemently opposed to me having anything to do with this,” he added. “But in Potter canon you see no trace of transphobic sensitivity. She has written this meditation of kindness and acceptance. And Dumbledore is a beautiful role.”

When Lithgow was announced as Dumbledore, he revealed that a friend with a trans child had sent him a link to an article entitled: “An open letter to John Lithgow: Please walk away from Harry Potter.”

“It was a hard decision,” Lithgow said, in Rotterdam. “It made me uncomfortable and unhappy that people insisted I walk away from the job. I chose not to do that.”

Variety reported that one audience member expressed their disappointment to Lithgow about his decision to remain in the show, later leaving the room in protest. “I’m perfectly ready for collisions of opinion. I understand it,” Lithgow said afterwards.

In 2020, Rowling posted a 3,600-word online statement criticising proposed changes to gender recognition laws by detailing her own experience of sexual assault and domestic violence. She has stated she opposes “the new trans activism” and opposes cisgender women sharing single-sex spaces with trans women, saying it would mean women were forced to “open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside”.

She donated £70,000 to For Women Scotland, the campaign group who played a key role in bringing about the challenge of how a woman is defined in law, and founded the JK Rowling Women’s Fund, which supports individuals and organisations “fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights”.

Other actors in the Harry Potter series, including Nick Frost, who plays Hagrid, and Paapa Essiedu, who plays Snape, have distanced themselves from Rowling’s views since signing on to the show. Last year Rowling said she would not fire Essiedu for signing a petition in favour of trans rights, writing on social media: “I don’t have the power to sack an actor from the series and I wouldn’t exercise it if I did. I don’t believe in taking away people’s jobs or livelihoods because they hold legally protected beliefs that differ from mine.”

The lead actors in the original Potter films, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, as well as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them star Eddie Redmayne, have all made critical statements distancing themselves from Rowling.

The new Potter series is due to premiere in 2027 and, according to HBO, will be a “faithful adaptation” of the books by Rowling. The eight feature films based on the books were released between 2001 and 2011, and the series has a similarly ambitious timeframe, with Casey Bloys, chair and CEO of HBO and Max Content, saying it would run for “10 consecutive years”.

Lithgow alluded to this in Rotterdam, joking: “I’m the oldest person in this entire room, just turned 80. And yet I signed a contract – I will be playing Dumbledore for the next eight years! I absolutely have to keep at it. I felt: ‘Wow! That means I will live to be 88.’ I have that in writing.”

Legalised assisted dying should “gradually” be extended to dementia sufferers, the author Ian McEwan has said.

McEwan was “shocked by the snow-drilling attempts” by those opposed to the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public book event in London, citing its more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers backing the bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged filibustering.

If passed, the bill would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for adults with less than six months to live. “We’re not asking much,” said McEwan, who is a patron of Dignity in Dying.

“I like it when some bishop says on the radio: ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge,’ and I think yes, it is the thin end of the wedge”, because certain groups are “missing from it”, such as those with dementia. “It has to be physical pain”.

“My guess is that if we pushed it through with all the protections around it – of doctors and dispassionate people making judgments – we’ll look back on this and think, ‘Why did we ever let people die in agony?’”

Asked explicitly if he would add an amendment to extend assisted dying to dementia sufferers, McEwan said: “Gradually, yeah, I would. But I think it does require a lot more thought and the idea of living wills.”

“My mother used to say to me: ‘If I ever become really terrible, I’d like you to finish me off.’ But of course, that’s to commit murder as things stand. Imagine standing up in court and saying: ‘Well, she did say when we were on the beach 20 years ago …’”

McEwan spoke about dementia’s impact on his family – his mother Rose had dementia, as well as his brother-in-law and another close family member. “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.”

McEwan was speaking at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London, as part of its Conversation series, discussing his latest book, What We Can Know, in which dementia is a major theme. He has also written about dementia in previous novels, Lessons and Saturday.

The Atonement author also discussed the new novel he is working on, during a conversation about the ban on social media platforms for under-16s in Australia, and the measure’s potential adoption in the UK. The author said that he is beginning “to wish that the internet didn’t exist. I think back enviously to the 70s, where one of the great luxuries of civilisation – which is solitude – was bounteously available, and has been worn away, and now so much dark stuff is coming out of it. I’m trying to write a novel about this. The disappearance of childhood, or the sense of childhood being under escort.” He said that he was in favour of social media bans.

A major theme of What We Can Know is climate change: the novel is partly set in 2119, at which point Britain has become an archipelago, having been submerged by rising seas. McEwan said that while he has “never known the world in a worse state”, he maintains a “little streak of optimism that we’re going to scrape through”.

What We Can Know has an “emotional background” made up partially of despair, and partially of hope, said the author. If you have children and grandchildren, “you want the human project to survive”. Yet, there’s a “countervailing current” common to all old people, he said – in order to make sense of their lives, people think: “with the end of me, it’ll be the end of everything – ‘après moi, le déluge.’ Elderly pessimism is a very powerful constraint on clear thinking”. He sees What We Can Know as an expression of those “contrary forces”.

A much-hyped novel about a housewife who uses Tupperware parties to secretly smuggle erotic stories to her friends and neighbours is causing a stir in the television world, igniting a fierce bidding contest over the right to adapt it for the small screen.

Wet Ink, a novel by the 33-year-old London-based author Abigail Avis, is not scheduled to be published until the spring 2027, but industry insiders said a fierce auction between six major production companies had already taken place for the TV rights.

Those interested in the project have called the novel “Tupperware erotica”, and the frenzied interest is part of a recent spate of books by female authors to prompt huge competition for their TV rights as streamers and production companies search for bankable titles that can be sold around the world.

The battle follows a similar contest over the publishing rights for the novel, which eventually went to Hodder & Stoughton, owned by Hachette UK, for a six-figure fee. The publisher is already planning a global marketing blitz.

Set in 1960s London, the book charts the literary ambitions of Mitzy Barlow, a housewife and mother-of-two stranded in a loveless marriage who has grown weary of the mind-numbing monotony of her life.

She begins hosting Tupperware parties – ubiquitous events in the 1950s and 60s – to make some extra income from selling the plastic containers to women in her neighbourhood.

However, she soon begins to combine her role as hostess with a burgeoning career as a writer of sexual fantasies, which she starts to compose each night in a journal to help her deal with the bleakness of her marriage.

As her confidence grows, Mitzy begins writing her own stories under the pseudonym Queen B. Before long, her part-time job selling Tupperware becomes a cover for smuggling erotic stories to her customers, with the stories stashed safely inside the airtight containers.

As her alter ego finds success, Mitzy is left with a dilemma over pursuing a different life, fraught with the danger of being accused of indecency.

The novel’s TV rights were eventually secured by Kudos, part of Banijay UK, one of the world’s biggest production companies. It has been behind programmes including the Netflix series The House of Guinness, and the BBC’s This Town and SAS Rogue Heroes.

“We are thrilled to have acquired the rights to Abigail’s novel,” said Karen Wilson, the joint managing director of Kudos. “She is a brilliantly talented writer, and Wet Ink is a must read. We cannot wait to get started on developing it into a TV series for both the UK and international market.”

Insiders said the demand was a sign of the continuing importance to production companies of hunting down new content, as competition has intensified with the rise of the streamers. There has also been a recent trend of books by female writers to be the subject of ferocious auctions.

Industry sources said that in another such contest, 21 offers had already been made. The field for that title has been whittled down to a final 10, described as “a roll-call of glittery producers”. The book in question has not even been finished.

Another novel, Death’s a Bitch by the debut author Eloise Rodger, was acquired earlier this year by another Banijay-backed producer, , after international interest led to intense competition for the rights.

The novel follows Aggie and the plight of her younger sister Marcie, who has faced a long illness and endless waiting lists. Death offers Aggie a job that will ensure Aggie survives.

Avis, who studied and taught English literature before entering a fellowship with The Royal Literary Fund, has said the idea for Wet Ink came to her during one of her children’s midnight feeds. Her agent, Hayley Steed, said that in selling the book rights she had never seen a reaction like it.

“Within mere hours we were turning down international pre-empts and it has broken agency records around the globe,” she said. “Abigail has written a book that encapsulates the perfect bookclub read; an empowering call to arms, a warm story of female community and friendship, and just the right amount of naughtiness with its snippets of erotica.”

If you find it difficult to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying or dead river. This is easier. We know what this looks like. We know how it feels. A dying river is one who does not reach the sea. A dying river’s fish float belly-up in stagnant pools. Swans on the upper Thames near Windsor now wear brown tidemarks on their snowy chest feathers, showing where they have sailed through sewage. I recently saw a Southern Water riverbank sign badged with a bright blue logo that read “Water for Life”. The sign instructed passersby to “avoid contact with the water. If you’ve had contact with the water, please wash your hands before eating.” In parts of this septic isle, fresh water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable.

How did it come to this – and where do we go from here? The crisis is one of imagination as well as of legislation. We have forgotten that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. Our relationship with fresh water has become intensely instrumentalised, privatised and monetised: river understood as resource, not life force. The duty of care for rivers, who extend such care to us, has been abrogated. Regulation has gone unenforced, monitoring is strategically underfunded. Rivers named after deities – the Shannon (Sinnan), the Dee (Deva) – now struggle under burdens of nitrates, forever chemicals and waste.

One of modernity’s many vanishing tricks is to disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions. We now take it for granted that we take rivers for granted. It is unremarkable that a company registered yesterday is, in the eyes of the law, an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue – but that a river who has flowed for 10,000 years has no rights at all.

Water stocks are traded on futures markets, with disaster-capitalist investors gambling that crises to come will drive unit prices up. Fresh water is fiscalised as a liquid asset or, as Goldman Sachs hungrily describes it, “the new oil”. Rivers have been reduced to “one-dimensional water”, to adapt Marcuse: de-territorialised and organised in order to maximise yield. Flowing fresh water has been systematically stripped of its spirits, and reduced to what Isaac Newton called “inanimate brute matter”. Thus designated as feedstock for the machine, rivers have been laid open for the slow violence that has been inflicted on them.

The vast Anthropocene reshaping of the planet that is now under way extends to water as well as land. The Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River in China impounds so much water that it has measurably slowed the rotation speed of the Earth. Oil extraction from the Alberta tar sands uses more than 200bn litres of fresh water a year: this is abstracted from the Athabasca River, rendered toxic – and then injected back into aquifers by way of “disposal”. Europe has the most obstructed river system of any continent, with more than 1m barriers fragmenting flow and only a handful of free-running waterways remaining.

It has long been in the interests of power to deem nature dead, in preparation for its extraction, conversion and consumption. This systematic de-animation process has been accelerated to calamity speed by the new US administration. Trump’s inaugural address was obsessively focused on “land”; his speech a bingo card of 19th-century settler-Christian tropes glorifying first the subjugation then exploitation of the continent’s “resources”, natural and human: manifest destiny, the “untamed wilderness”, the “frontier hypothesis”. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Doug Burgum – the new interior secretary – described public lands and waters as “America’s balance sheet”, which he would “unleash” for “economic activity”. Everything must be assetised. Listening to Burgum, I thought of Leslie Marmon Silko in her visionary Ceremony (1977): ‘They see no life / When they look they see only objects / The world is a dead thing for them / The trees and rivers are not alive …’

As the living world has been further deadened into “brute matter”, so language that recognises its liveliness – a “grammar of animacy”, in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated phrase – has in turn become rarer. Words make worlds. In English, we “it” rivers, trees, mountains and creatures: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human people. In English, pronouns for natural features are “which” or “that”: the river that flows; the forest that grows. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow. In English, we refer to a river in the singular, but “river” is one of the great group nouns, containing multitudes. In English, there is no verb “to river”. But what could be more of a verb than a river?

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In the spring of 2020, I made the first notes for a book about ideas of life. Under the heading “Anima”, I jotted a triplet of quick, provocative questions to myself: Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? Is a river alive? All have proved good questions with which to spend time, but it was the last of the three that would not let me go.

In the end, I spent four years in pursuit of answers to this enigmatic question. That pursuit took me to places in the world where rivers are being imagined in radically different ways; it brought me into contact with scores of brave and visionary people – among them lawyers, judges, ecologists, activists, community leaders and artists – who are working to redefine the ways rivers are perceived and treated; who are working, indeed, to redefine life itself.

In urban planning, “daylighting” is the practice of bringing rivers back to the surface of towns and cities: unburying them from the dark tunnels in which they have been confined. These entombed watercourses are sometimes known as “ghost rivers”; their voices heard at street level only as prisoners’ whispers drifting from drain grilles. London has more than 20 such ghosts. You could walk the capital’s streets for years and not know that each day you are crossing rivers other than the Thames: the Fleet, the Moselle, the Walbrook, the Tyburn and the Westbourne to the north of the Thames; and south of it the Quaggy, the Neckinger, the Falconbrook and others, their names now largely lost to concrete and culvert.

“Daylighting” is a means of resurrecting river ghosts – of re-encountering rivers as fellow citizens. In cities where daylighting has occurred – Seattle, Yonkers, Singapore, San Antonio, many more – the results have often been transformative. In Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream was freed from the highway that encased it: the public park created along its banks now draws 90,000 pedestrians on an average day. Summer temperatures at the waterside can be five degrees cooler than surrounding areas, and air pollution levels have dropped by more than a third. Earlier this year, a long-buried section of Sheffield’s River Sheaf was disinterred in the city centre to widespread celebration; the result of a long campaign to make the river visible, restored and accessible.

Buried feelings, as well as buried rivers, can be daylighted. We need now, urgently, to resurface older, kinder ways of relating to rivers – and to see what transformations occur if rivers were recognised as both alive and killable. What might flow from such a recognition in terms of imagination, law and politics?

Seeking answers to such questions, I made three long river journeys to regions where rivers have become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called “the natural contract”. In each of these places, rivers are understood in some fundamental way to be “alive” – and in each place, too, the survival of rivers is under extreme threat: from mining, pollution and damming.

The first journey was to an Ecuadorian cloud forest named Los Cedros, home to the headwaters of the Rio Los Cedros, the “River of the Cedars”. In November 2021, as mining companies were preparing to destroy Los Cedros in search of its gold, the cloud forest was saved by an astonishing court judgment that invoked the “rights of nature” articles embedded in the Ecuadorian constitution, and proclaimed the “right to life” of the forest and its rivers.

The second was to the sorely wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the watery city of Chennai in south-east India. There, rivers barely endure for most of the year – then return monstrously in cyclone season to flood the city, bringing crocodiles and catfish into the inundated streets. There, too, an indefatigable group of young people is trying to resurrect a just water culture, in a region where humans and their ancestors have lived and thrived by rivers for at least 1m years but where a severe water amnesia has now taken hold.

The third journey was to the interior of Nitassinan (also known as Quebec), homeland of the Innu people, where the wild Mutehekau Shipu flows for more than 100 miles through roadless boreal forest to make seafall at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In 2021, that extraordinary river became the first in Canada to have its rights declared, as part of a campaign to save it from death by drowning at the hands of a planned multi-dam hydro development.

In the course of those journeys I met stolen, drowned and vanished rivers, and I saw the ruthlessly executed power of companies, criminals and governments. I also watched three people being brought back from within the shadow of death by rivers. I witnessed two mycological discoveries, one of which shifted slightly the whole story of life on Earth. By the time I finished writing, it was irrefutable to me that the rivers themselves had been my vital collaborators and co-authors.

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The question of what is alive is both an ancient and an urgent one. It is at the heart of the oldest written long-narrative poem we know, the Epic of Gilgamesh, more than 4,000 years old in its earliest form. The Epic is materially a river text: it was recorded on tablets made from river clay, in a cuneiform script pressed into the clay using the trimmed end of a river reed, and it was first composed and circulated in Mesopotamia, the region whose name means “the land between rivers”.

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In that poem’s central episode, Gilgamesh travels to the sacred Cedar Forest, which grows on the banks of the Euphrates. There he confronts a “demon” called Humbaba, who is in fact the embodiment of the forest’s anima. Gilgamesh slaughters Humbaba and then – in the world’s first recorded act of ecocide – draws his axe and clear-fells the Cedar Forest. Catastrophe follows, of course. The poem sounds a warning that we are still failing to heed, more than four millennia later. The law too is a storied thing – and as such it can be re-storied. On 20 March 2017 an extraordinary piece of legislation called the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act was passed in Aotearoa New Zealand’s parliament house, accompanied by tears and songs from many of those present. The act concerned the Whanganui River, who rises as meltwater on the slopes of three North Island volcanoes and flows for 180 miles to its mouth at the Tasman Sea.

At the act’s heart is a radical claim: that the Whanganui River is alive. The act speaks unambiguously of the river as an “indivisible and living whole”; a “spiritual and physical entity” with a “lifeforce”. “We want … to begin with the view that [the river] is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief,” said Gerrard Albert, lead negotiator for the Whanganui iwi (tribe) during the act’s drafting. To its declaration of the river as alive, the act added a second dramatic innovation: it also recognised the river as a rights-bearing “legal person”, with the capacity to represent itself in court.

The passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act rang like a gong-strike around the world and supercharged the dynamic, disruptive current of ideas usually known as the Rights of Nature movement. Over the past 20 years, Rights of Nature thinking has lit up activists, artists, lawmakers and politicians across six continents, and inspired powerful new forms of future dreaming.

Rivers have become a particular focus for this movement. “River rights” have become the commonest form of novel legal subjectivity in dozens of countries from Australia to Canada. A Universal Declaration of River Rights has been drawn up that recognises rivers as living entities with fundamental rights, including the right to flow and the right to be free from pollution. These ideas have now washed up on British shores. In early March, Lewes district council in East Sussex agreed to champion a charter of rights for the River Ouse, and river rights campaigns are emerging for the Clyde, the Don, the Derwent and the Rye.

Meanwhile, a wider chorus of voices is speaking up for Britain’s rivers in terms of life, death and love: animism energising activism. Feargal Sharkey has held government and industry’s feet to the fire for five years, fighting to reverse, as he puts it, “the simple truth of the matter that every river in England is dying”. Last November, 15,000 people joined a march for clean water in London, the biggest water protest in the country’s history. In the upper Usk, in Wales, the youth-led Penpont Project is restoring lost areas of riparian woodland and creating a “living memory map” of the sub-catchment. The inspirational activist-lawyer Paul Powlesland has forged a group of hardworking “guardians” for the River Roding in Essex, motivated by “the belief that the Roding is sacred, it is a being and it does have rights”. Each January now, a Blessing of the River Thames ceremony is held on London Bridge by the parishes of Southwark and St Magnus the Martyr. On the English-Welsh border, citizen scientists are organising and training one another in order to fight the demise of River Wye: “a great river dying before our eyes”, in George Monbiot’s words. The agile, bullish young organisation River Action is taking the government to court in order to drive policy change, and has created an extensive River Rescue Kit aimed at empowering ordinary people to take action for their waterbodies: River Action’s work is founded on the belief that “every family, home and institution has its roots in rivers of this land”, and that “rescuing the rivers is upholding values of gratitude, respect, justice, love, compassion and honour”.

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Rivers are easily wounded. But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.

On 2 October 2024, the century-old Iron Gate dam was removed from the upper Klamath River, who flows out of Oregon and into California. Its demolition concluded the largest de-damming project in US history, and was the outcome of two decades of campaigning and watershed activism, led by members of the Klamath Tribe.

Only a few days later, something extraordinary happened. A sonar camera set up by scientists detected a single chinook salmon migrating upstream to spawn, past the pinch-point where the Iron Gate Dam had stood. It was the first fish to make that journey in more than 100 years, guided by an ancient navigation system and driven by an undeniable urge.

As the salmon return in number to the Klamath, so with them will come the web of life they feed. Salmon are primarily ocean creatures; they carry marine nutrients far inland in their bodies when they come to spawn. In the upper watershed, scavengers will drag off the carcasses of spawned salmon, strip their flesh and guts and discard the skeletons. Fungi will reach up their white ghost-fingers, draw the fishbones down and decompose them – then share the goodness with the roots of the trees. By means of the river, the ocean will feed the forest.

I saw the sonar image of that single chinook – the harbinger of all that is to come for the Klamath – on the day it was released. The image was grainy in the way that sonar is, the fish just a blurry lozenge-line set against a blurry background. Definition didn’t matter, though; the simple fact of it caused happiness to bloom suddenly huge in my heart, and the heaviness of spirit from which I had been suffering for weeks began to lift.

I haven’t been able to find the image of the salmon again online, though I’ve searched for it several times. It has swum back out into the ocean of the internet. Perhaps I dreamed it. I do know this for sure: water, once healed, heals us in return.

In the three decades since I became a lawyer, human rights – once understood as an uncomplicated good, a tool for securing dignity for the vulnerable against abuses by the powerful – have increasingly come under assault. Perhaps never more so than in the current moment: we are constantly talking about human rights, but often in a highly sceptical way. When Liz Truss loudly proclaims “We’ve got to leave the ECHR, abolish the supreme court and abolish the Human Rights Act,” she’s not the fringe voice she might have been in the 1990s. She represents a dangerous current of opinion, as prevalent on parts of the radical left as on the populist right of politics. It seems to be gaining momentum.

As an idealistic youngster, I would have been shocked to know that in 2024 it would be necessary to return to the back-to-basics case, to justify the need for fundamental rights and freedoms. But in a world where facts are made fluid, what were once thought of as core values have become hard to distill and defend. In an atmosphere of intense polarisation, human rights are trashed along all parts of the political spectrum – either as a framework to protect markets, or as a form of undercover socialism. What stands out for me is that the most trenchant critics share a profound nationalism. Nationalists believe that universal human rights – the clue’s in the name – undermine the ability of states to agitate for their narrower interests.

It’s no coincidence that the governments keenest on turning inwards – Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, that of former president Bolsonaro in Brazil – have been least keen on common standards that protect minorities in their own territories and hold them to high standards in the international arena. At a time of insecurity, these leaders leverage fear to maximise their appeal. The prospect of a second Trump administration in the US demonstrates that this trend shows no sign of abating. In that context, it’s vital to make the case for human rights anew.

It boils down to this: given that so many of our problems – in an age of climate change, global disorder and artificial intelligence – can only be tackled with an international approach, a robust rights framework is more important than ever. There are parallels with the postwar period in which human rights were most fully articulated, a time when it was obvious to everybody that cooperation and global standards were the best way to shore up our common humanity after a period of catastrophic conflict and genocide.

Of course everyone believes in some rights – normally their own and those of friends, family and people they identify with. It is “other people’s” freedoms that are more problematic. The greater the divisions between us, the greater this controversy. And yet, it is precisely these extreme disparities in health, wealth, power and opinion that make rights, rather than temporary privileges given and taken away by governments, so essential. They provide a framework for negotiating disputes and providing redress for abuses without recourse to violence.

New technologies, and AI in particular, require more not less international regulation. As people spend more time online, they become vulnerable to degrading treatment, unfairness and discrimination, breaches of privacy, censorship and other threats. The so-called “black boxes” behind the technology we use make ever more crucial decisions about our daily lives, from banking to education, employment, policing and border control. Anyone who flirts with the notion of computer infallibility should never forget the postmasters and other such abuses, perpetrated and then concealed.

Perhaps most important of all is the growing contribution of human rights litigation to the struggle against climate catastrophe. A whole generation of lawyers and environmentalists is taking notes from earlier struggles, just as suffragists once learned from slavery abolitionists. This is despite the machinations of fossil fuel corporations versed in a thousand lobbying, jurisdictional and other delaying tactics.

Our shrinking, burning planet is the ultimate reason why nationalism does not work in the interests of humankind. Today’s global empires, sailing under logos rather than flags, need to be more directly accountable under human rights treaties. Our existing mechanisms, whether local and national governments, domestic and international courts, or some of the more notoriously tortuous UN institutions, may be imperfect and in need of reform. Yet, like all structures of civilisation, they are easier to casually denigrate than to invest in and adapt to be more effective.

While I have been writing this, I have been voting in the House of Lords on amendments to the so-called safety of Rwanda bill. It is the most regressive anti-human rights measure of recent times, and intended to be that way. It will not stop the boats of desperate people fleeing persecution, but is designed to stop the courts. British judges will be prevented from ensuring refugees’ fair treatment before they are rendered human freight and transported to a place about whose “safety” our supreme court was not satisfied. Rishi Sunak will be able to use this situation as excuse for an election pledge to repudiate the European convention on human rights.

If he gets his way, rights will be removed not just from those arriving by boat, but from every man, woman and child in the UK. By contrast, the golden thread of human rights is equal treatment: protecting others as we would wish to be protected ourselves, if that unhappy day ever came. It’s a thread we must never let go of.

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Shami Chakrabarti is a lawyer and Labour member of the House of Lords. She is the author of Human Rights: The Case for the Defence (Allen Lane), which she discusses with Zoe Williams in a livestreamed Guardian Live event at 8pm on 22 May. For tickets go to: theguardian.com/shami-event

Further reading

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein (Penguin, £14.99)

The Future of Human Rights by Alison Brysk (Polity, £14.99)

Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt (WW Norton, £11.26)