This is a rich and provocative account of the writing that underpins the work we put into the world. Visible here are the traces of the people we carry with us, the selves we hope we can be, the relationships for which we try to create and hold space in what are sometimes (often) deeply inhospitable environments. This collection chronicles what the authors have survived, and how, and what has been sacrificed along the way – and reckons with how writing can hold out a measure of joy and relief in the darkness. It deserves to be treasured.

Laura J. Shepherd, The University of Sydney

This book is a refuge. For the collective involved, writing and editing created a warm and welcoming home, and that in itself is a precious gift in and around academia today. But reading it is a long-sought shelter too. Brimming with beauty and generosity as much as rebellious honesty, Writing Saved Me will jolt you into a fresh awareness to all that it takes to make our disciplines and institutions more hospitable, but all along it will keep reassuring you: you are not alone.

Anna Selmeczi, University of Cape Town

For many students, their first experience of IR in the classroom is trying to fit ideas into grey-block paradigms that originate in old scholarly conversations from the 1980s. This is a monochrome world without people, populated instead by lists of abstract concepts. This collection brings the people back into IR, with all the wonderful mess and complexity that implies. Each contribution is a peak into one of the many personal worlds that underpin the public faces we see in peer-reviewed articles and monographs.

Lucian M. Ashworth, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Writing for survivance, writing to repair, these tales bear witness to academic warriors shaking their metaphorical dreadlocks loose in an attempt to both let their hair down AND signal their refusal to be converted to fodder in the neoliberal academy.

Annie Paul, Editor-in-chief, PREE (preelit.com), the digital magazine of Caribbean writing