Unwritten Lives

Dear Home Secretary, We are writing on behalf of constituents in Crouch End, Haringey, who have asked us to raise concerns about remarks you made at a public event recently.

On Monday 20 April Shabana Mahmood told “white liberal” hecklers to “f**k right off”. Under no circumstances is this acceptable. With standards in public life in the UK slipping, community cohesion disintegrating, and democratic procedures eroding, Mahmood must be held to account for her abusive language. I have written to my local north London MP, Catherine West, and local councillors, calling for an apology from the home secretary, because everybody has the right to feel safe.

"Whenever I hear a Western pundit or politician go on about 'democracy,' I say to myself, 'Oh hell, give it a rest. Nobody’s buying that crap anymore.' I think that people serious about Palestine and decolonization more broadly react skeptically to the term because we understand it to be the vocabulary of our own dispossession."

Join the Centre for the Study of Race, Class and Empire for the public lecture by Professor Steven Salaita, renowned Palestinian intellectual, scholar and novelist on Wednesday, 8 April 2026, 5.45-8pm.

It has been one year today since the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, was murdered in South Africa on 15 February 2025. To date, there have been no arrests, demonstrating once more the impunity with which hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQI+ community in South Africa are met. To mark the first anniversary of Hendricks’ murder, Unwritten Lives is today reposting Muriithi Kariuki's seminal essay on the routine silence and everyday erasure that underpin homophobic violence. "The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure."

A nihilistic political thriller about the obliteration of an American family when a new girlfriend’s authoritarian ideas rip them apart

While South Africa’s historic categorisation of Gender-Based Violence and Femicide as a national disaster has intensified the spotlight on the country’s appalling statistics of violence against women and girls, the perpetrators remain mostly unmentioned. A society that cannot speak about its male perpetrators can never understand its female victims and survivors.

For a snapshot of the authoritarian era to which today’s launch of Unwritten Lives is a response, we don’t have to rewind too far, just to the recent past, to moments that still reside fresh in recent memory.

When a DNA test revealed the author’s Roma heritage, he travelled to one of Europe’s largest Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) gatherings—Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria—to learn more about this unique historic event.