Zoe Fairbairns - Journalism and Non-fiction

Contributor to: The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, New Scientist, Sunday Times, New Society, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, MsLexia, The Bookseller, New Internationalist, The Tablet, newbooks, UK Writer and others.

Available online…

Wages for Housework
"Strikers negotiating with employers know that, if they hold out for too much, scab labour will be found to replace them. An individual woman refusing to marry, live with, cook for, or become pregnant by, a man who will not agree to share domestic responsibilities, is on her own with the knowledge that he may find someone more pliable."

1984 Came And Went Based on a talk given at the University of Alcala, Spain in 2000, and first published in The Road From George Orwell: His achievement and Legacy edited by Alberto Lazaro. (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG, 2001.)

Smash Capitalism – But Not Yet? “Fund managers are the people your Marxist study group has warned you about – the ones who move billions of pounds around the globe at the click of a mouse in a ceaseless search for profit. Some of that profit is your pension, and that of your workmates.”

The Nun’s True Story
Marie Louise Habets was the real woman behind the fictional Sister Luke played by Audrey Hepburn in the Fred Zinneman film The Nun’s Story.
Kathryn Hulme was her friend and partner who told her story.

Mostly it takes Work: Interview with Stella Duffy
“We can’t assume everyone is going to want all of us all the time. And I think for all of us, that is really hard to accept. We’re human beings. We want to be wanted all the time.”

The Twilight Hour by Elizabeth Wilson

The Daphne du Maurier Companion edited by Helen Taylor

Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light

We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

Letters to Charlotte by Caeia March

Storage Stories by Jim Bob

Interview with Sue Townsend
“I used to think, oh my God,
one day I’ll read the Manchester Guardian, and understand it.”

Interview with Gyles Brandreth
“I am instinctively a Conservative. The very fact that you query me on my view on policy, shows that possibly you are not a Conservative. It’s a mark of me being Conservative that I do not have enormous views on a great number of things. That to me is what makes a Conservative attractive.”

Interview with Paul Torday
“Drug companies are always accountable to their shareholders. So there is this driver to get people to consume more drugs. And I find that quite sinister.”

Interview with Pat Barker
“Racial differences are fundamentally very, very trivial differences. They are minor adaptations to climate. That’s all they are. Whereas gender is the great organising principle of life.”