Martyn Bedford - Writer

In these febrile political times, it seems apt for a new anthology of fiction about resistance to be hitting the bookshelves (virtual and physical). Protest: Stories of Resistance is the latest book of short-fiction to be published by the excellent Manchester-based independent Comma Press . . . and I’m pleased and honoured to be among the contributing authors.

In putting together this anthology, editor Ra Page paired twenty writers with leading social historians and other experts, to produce stories and commentaries ranging across centuries of political dissent – from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Poll Tax riots, from the Suffragettes to the anti-Iraq War demonstration, from the Diggers to Greenham Common. For my story, Withen – which centres on the Battle of Orgreave, during the 1984-85 miners’ strike – I worked collaboratively with Prof. David Waddington, of Sheffield Hallam University, who assisted my research and has written a factual afterword to accompany my fictional response to those events.

Other contributing authors include: Kate Clanchy, David Constantine, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Maggie Gee, Matthew Holness, Sara Maitland, Courttia Newland, Alexei Sayle and Kit de Waal. I’m proud to see my name – and my story – alongside theirs, and to be making my small contribution to the political discourse generated by this recasting of social history through the prism of imaginative literature.

Protest: Stories of Resistance (hardback, £14.99) is officially published on July 6th but is already available online direct from Comma Press at a discount price of £13.50. Click here to visit the book’s page on the Comma website.