Renard Press Ltd – serie

First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word.

In Why I Write, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the works we remember him for. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell's mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writers' oeuvre.

First published in 1921 as part of her ground-breaking short-story collection Monday or Tuesday, Kew Gardens follows the thoughts of a set of characters walking past a flower bed in the royal botanic garden on a hot July day.

Revolution has torn through the land, leaving society teetering on a knife edge. A young artist finds himself holed up at the City Hotel with his mother, where he must sing for his supper.

The fifth collection from an award-winning poet, As if it Meant Something is a wide-ranging selection that lays the tapestry of life beautifully bare, and in which everyday experiences sit alongside the devastating decay caused by domestic violence and terminal illness, the soaring beauty of the Irish coastline and love, art, thought.

Stories surrounding King Arthur have been told since time immemorial, but The Fragile Land approaches the legend from a radical angle, setting it firmly in the post-Roman world of late fifth-century Europe, chronicling the crucial years of Arthur’s life, from the age of fifteen into his early thirties, as he comes to the fore as elected Overlord.

Almost Adult is a brilliantly funny play that lays bare the darker side of slick modern workplaces and the underhand employment practices that police them – or fail to – with stunning lightness of touch.

When Lia lays an egg she doesn’t know what to do. At her age, it’s impossible to escape the baby question. She feels her heart’s not in it – but the egg is impossible to ignore… Fledging is a riveting tale and resounding call for a woman’s right to make her own choices, whether that means embracing motherhood or living child-free.

The Westminster Alice is a collection of humorous vignettes by Saki that forms a political pastiche of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, featuring an unforgettable cast of politicians of the day, and brought to life with illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould, 'with apologies to Sir John Tenniel' for their striking likeness to the Alice illustrations.

In The Prevention of Literature, Orwell discusses the effect of the ownership of the press on the accuracy of reports of events, and takes aim at political language, which 'consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together.' It is a stirring cry for freedom from censorship, which Orwell says must start with the writer themselves.

Politics vs. Literature is, at heart, a review of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Using the book as an example of enjoying a book whose author one cannot stand, Orwell goes on to say that he considers Gulliver's Travels a work of art, leaving the reader to reconsider the books on their own shelves.

Exponentially increasing levels of unemployment and simmering racial tension in Moss Side, inner Manchester, exploded into mass riots on the 8th of July 1981, following the siege of a police station.In the Moss frames the events from the perspectives of Janet, a student nurse working in A&E, and Nav, a Sikh police officer on the streets. Both crave a return to normality and just want to fit in, but when violence breaks out and a teenage boy is stabbed, they are thrust together and forced to confront questions that arise about what really happened in the Moss.

In 1881, three writers and rights activists, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, came together to publish the first volume in their groundbreaking History of Woman Suffrage series - a series that eventually went on to fill 5700 pages and lend weight to a movement that changed the course of history for ever.

The life of Joan of Arc is the stuff of legend, and her cruel death led to her being declared a martyr, granting her an unwavering legacy. Following her canonisation in 1920, and against a history of overly romanticised retellings of the story, Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to give a more accurate account.

Shooting an Elephant tells the story of a police officer in Burma who is called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant. Loosely based on Orwell's own experiences, the tightly written essay weaves together fact and fiction indistinguishably, and leaves the reader contemplating the heavy topic of colonialism.

The Busybody is the most popular comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Susanna Centlivre. The play centres on two couples trying to form a relationship against the wills of their guardians, and in a battle of wits, playing with many conventions from theatre traditions across the continent, a conclusion is eventually reached.Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, Centlivre was immensely successful in her day, drawing huge crowds to extended runs of her numerous plays, but the stabbing male pens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried her work as being louche and dangerous, and her name slowly sunk into obscurity.This edition, published with William Hazlitt's prefatory note and extra material on Centlivre's life and writing, seeks to highlight the dexterity with which she took on the stage.

Fearing that England was about to be wiped from the face of the earth by the Nazi bombers flying overhead, Orwell put pen to paper and set out to make a record of English culture. England Your England is this record, and is an important tableau of the nation's history, and demonstrates a resolute refusal to bow to the threatening forces of Fascism.

One of the earliest known published works written by an African author, The Interesting Narrative was a groundbreaking memoir that helped pave the way for the abolition of slavery. In it, Equiano describes his early life in Africa, his abduction and gruelling journey across the world on a slave ship and the years he spent in servitude, fighting in others' wars and helping to enrich those who would wish him in fetters for the rest of his life.Published in London once Equiano had secured his freedom, the runaway success of the book led to his financial independence, and he toured England, Scotland and Ireland lecturing on the horrors he lived through, and he dedicated his life to advocating for the abolition of slavery. Forgotten until the 1960s, The Interesting Narrative has again shot to fame, and is now considered the most detailed account of a slave's life, exposing the trials of the long road to freedom.