Unspeakable Things

Shortlisted for The Green Carnation Prize 2014
'This is not a fairytale. This is a story about how sex and money and power police our dreams.'
Clear-eyed, witty and irreverent, Laurie Penny is as ruthless in her dissection of modern feminism and class politics as she is in discussing her own experiences in journalism, activism and underground culture.
This is a book about poverty and prejudice, online dating and eating disorders, riots in the streets and lies on the television. The backlash is on against sexual freedom for men and women and social justice ­- and feminism needs to get braver.
Penny speaks for a new feminism that takes no prisoners, a feminism that is about justice and equality, but also about freedom for all. It's about the freedom to be who we are, to love who we choose, to invent new gender roles, and to speak out fiercely against those who would deny us those rights. It is a book that gives the silenced a voice ­- a voice that speaks of unspeakable things.

Laurie Penny is a writer and journalist. She writes for Vice, the Guardian and many other publications, is a columnist and Contributing Editor at the New Statesman magazine and Editor-at-Large at cult New York literary project The New Inquiry. At the age of twenty-three she was the youngest person to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her blog 'Penny Red' which, like her first feminist book, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, was a word-of-mouth hit. She has reported on radical politics, protest, digital culture and feminism from around the world, working with activists from the Occupy movement and the European youth uprisings. She has 75,000 followers on Twitter and in 2012 won the British Media Awards' 'Twitter Public Personality of the Year' prize, which she accepted in absentia with a speech about the ongoing harassment of women on social media. Laurie is a nerd, a nomad and an activist. Born in 1986, she lives in London.
@PennyRed