CREATORS’ STATEMENT

“ As a farmer’s daughter from Norfolk, You Told Us To Talk About the Weather is some of the most intensely personal work I’ve created. Over the past 5 years, I’ve worked with farmers and  young people across Norfolk and Lincolnshire to explore and understand the impact of climate change has on agricultural settings. What I’ve seen and learned has not only brought me closer to my homeland but it’s highlighted that farming has been unfairly sidelined from a great number of climate conversations. Discussions of oil, plastic and pollution draw our attention to urban, industrialised areas but why aren’t we looking at the rural? Why aren’t we fighting for the people and jobs whose livelihood literally depends on the weather, soil and plants? Our lives and access to food relies on farmland but if we keep ignoring it, we’re facing a real threat of only having 60 viable harvests left in England. So I wrote this to combat that imbalance and to try to get people to really talk about the weather”

Emma-Louise Howell - Writer

So why is it so hard to speak about the climate crisis?

Through poems, satire and interviews with climate activists across the UK, You Told Us To Talk About The Weather unpacks our national obsession with small talk and asks how we can use creativity to transform these conversations into meaningful change.

Written by multi-award winning playwright and featured on BBC Introducing, Emma-Louise Howell, this is a striking interrogation of how we tell climate stories in post-Covid Britain.

Emma-Louise Howell is an award-winning playwright from East Anglia. She trained at RADA where she was awarded the Michael Ross Prize and has since been shortlisted for the Theatre503 International Playwriting Prize, The Stage Innovation Award, Women in Theatre Lab, Off-West End Adopt a Playwright Prize and ITV Original Voices. You Told Us To Talk About the Weather is her debut poetry pamphlet.