Part Five: Narrative

Author Interviews Revisited

Between November 2023 and May 2025, I published 31 interviews with authors of books about animal rights, veganism, and related social justice issues. During this summer, I’m taking a break from this schedule to prepare for a second series of author interviews to be published starting in the autumn. Meanwhile, I’m publishing a five-part introductory series of author interviews grouped by theme. The themes are vegan living, animal ethics, social justice, animal exploitation, and narratives.

First, what do I mean by narrative? Well, my 1976 well-thumbed Penguin English Dictionary defines narrative as

noun story, connected account of events

In one of my favourite books about writing, Story Craft by Jack Hart, narrative and plot are defined as

A sequence of events. In any story, principal characters do one thing, then another, then another, and the writer’s recounting of that sequence creates the narrative. At its simplest level, then, a narrative is just a chronology of events. Plot, on the other hand, is clearly something different than mere narrative. A plot emerges when a storyteller carefully selects and arranges material so that larger meanings can emerge.

So, what have narrative and plot got to do with books about animal rights, veganism, and related social justice issues?

As these four books demonstrate, the authors tell a story about the author of Black Beauty, the biography of the founders of a farmed animal advocacy organisation, a novel that weaves social justice issues into its storyline, and a fantasy in which humanity’s salvation is integral. These are all examples of narrative with social justice for animals embedded in them.

As I write the biography of Topsy the elephant, I have become increasingly aware of the power of narrative to change people’s hearts and minds. Can the passionate biography of one elephant reach a greater audience than a sober book exploring human-elephant relationships?

Narrative can make all the difference; however, both serve a justified need, as they’re different books aimed at dissimilar audiences.

Not all books can be written with a compelling narrative, but those that do, by taking the reader on a journey, have the potential to make the greatest impact. From my 2,000-plus library of books about animals, I wonder if Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, or Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, or Richard Adams’s Watership Down, or J M Coetzee’s Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello made the greatest public impact of them all. And not Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Carol Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat, or Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep—each one is, of course, an important contribution to public understanding about animals.

But narrative reaches the parts, as is said, that non-narrative can’t.

The narrative significance of the novel, Black Beauty, is doubly important. First, the life story of a horse told by himself and how the emerging humane movement embraced and promoted the book to spread the word of kindness to animals to children and adults. Second, the biography of the author, Anna Sewell, and her life’s challenges and inspirations for writing Black Beauty.

In my interview with Celia Brayfield, author of Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the Story of Animal Rights, she told me that she

wanted to honour the memory of an ordinary disabled woman who gave her best to her community throughout her life, who quietly lived by her Christian principles and who left a legacy in establishing animal welfare as a mainstream value. Anna Sewell was left disabled in her early teens by a simple, everyday accident.

Emma Silverton was moved to write the biography of her grandparents, Peter and Anna Roberts, who founded Compassion In World Farming. Emma’s hope, she told me in our interview, was to educate readers about

the horrors of factory farming, the inspiring history of the animal advocacy movement in this country and beyond, and the remarkable lives of my grandparents.

Again, the pairing of the book’s narrative of social justice with the life story of the authors.

Alex Lockwood is a writer whose three books illustrate different approaches to narrative featuring social justice for animals and the environment.

His first book, The Pig in Thin Air, explored his relationship to his own body with those of pigs intensively raised for food production. As a vegan animal rights activist, he runs the roads taken by hauliers when they transport pigs from the factory farm to the slaughterhouse, where he joins the protestors holding a vigil outside the entrance. In his novel, The Chernobyl Privileges, Alex links the protagonists and the personal issues they face with their proximity to living close to Britain’s nuclear submarine naval base in Scotland at the time of the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Alex told me in our interview for his third book, Daddio!, that

to be as good an activist as I can be, I must exercise my writing muscle all the time; to be the best writer I can be and contribute the skills I have to the cause. For me, creative, imaginative storytelling and the craftsmanship of wordsmithing are vital skills for activism. Being a writer of books, fiction and nonfiction, is not only valuable in itself, but also the practice that I need to keep practising, as a craft, to make my contribution to the work that needs to be done, for animals, the climate, and our planet.

“I wrote the Earthlings trilogy because I wanted to save animals,” Ray Star told me in our interview.

When I tell people this, they often look at me quite confused. How does a YA (Young Adult) Fantasy story about a girl born of magick, destined to save or destroy her world, help save animals? Ah ha! I think to myself … how indeed. It is within that very structure that my idea of raising awareness for animals through storytelling came to be.

Ray explained that a

story of magick, adventure, friendship and family dynamics, of a girl raised in secret away from the outside world, for fear of all that she might, or might not become. Of a world where humans are no longer the dominant species and where animals rule all, and at its essence, the desire to put readers in an animal’s pawprints, with the intent of inspiring empathy and compassion for them.

I’m tempted to write the cliché here that life is one big story. Crass. But true. Life is one big story. Or, rather, life is lots of stories. They interweave and aggregate together into multiple narrative arcs. The ultimate story is birth, life, and death. This selection of interviews with authors demonstrates that narrative is important not only for human lives but also for telling the lives of animals and the fate of the Earth.

Storytelling serves “universal human needs,” wrote Jack Hart in Story Craft.

It teaches us [explains Hart] how to live by discovering how our fellow human beings overcome the challenges in their lives. And it helps us discover the universals that bind us to everything around us.