Editorial: Life writing beyond the human

In our call for papers for this special issue, we solicited submissions of/about all modes of life writing that consider experiences, relationality, and intersubjectivity beyond the human. We posed the following questions to our potential collaborators: • How do we write the abundance of more-than-human and nonhuman life in which we situate our own? • What forms emerge when lives aren’t coded via anthropocentric timelines? • How might anthropogenic climate change prompt urgent new forms of life writing that exceed and entangle human subjectivities? As the essays and creative works within this special issue attest, such questions were only a partial list of possible lines of enquiry when it comes to life writing beyond the human. But all of these lines of enquiry are underpinned by a desire to undo the myth of human superiority. In this special issue of Text, we are thrilled to include contributions by postgraduate students, early career researchers, and established writers and scholars. Each contributor brings their unique orientation to the theme and its provocations, writing into and through the human as an always ambiguous and permeable category, whose boundaries shimmer and smudge in connection with vibrant material, technologies, animals, environments, illness, and finitude. As in any curated anthology, the specific enquiries of individual researchers here attain further complexity in conversation with one another.