Finnuala Brett

Intrepid Times • 1st March 2023

The Quiet of the Peripheries

The spring months in Guatemala’s highland valleys are far enough from the end of the wet season that dust begins to settle, and the heat of the afternoons is sometimes just a little too much. After days of idleness and sweat, the idea of cold water and respite hovers in the mind like a mirage.

Epigram • 26th February 2023

My Mother's House: Remembering a Place in Time

The Croft Magazine // When the world of travel feels more limitless than ever, the places from home are sometimes the ones most worth exploring.

That's What She Said • 28th October 2022

The Women of Iran

Finnuala Brett addresses the recent humanitarian and innately feminist crisis of the treatment of women and minorities under current Iranian regimes.

I am not a woman of Iran, but I am a woman. And in my womanhood, I can ride a bike in the streets of my town, or wear shorts in summer when it’s too hot and trousers would stick to my skin. I leave the country without a man; I have sexual autonomy; if I wish to prioritise my career I will not be deemed less than the woman I could be as a wife.

“J

National Geographic • 6th October 2022

Alone On A Slow River

Finnuala Brett’s entry, ‘Alone On a Slow River’, runner up in National Geographic’s Travel Writing Competition 2022.

Epigram • 15th September 2022

Expanding Horizons: Travel And The Changing Self

The Croft Magazine // It’s not the place you travel to, but rather your openness to a journey that can leave a lasting impact on the self. Travel challenges your perceptions of the world as it is known to you, and helps affirm your sense of place in it.

Nearly three years ago, I left home by myself for the first time. After two months of vividly new experiences, I spent the eleven hour return flight wallowing over my journal, reading and re-reading every word about every day. The thought of dri

I:M • 27th November 2021

'The Movement' and 'Fati's Choice' - The Stories of Refugees —

This year’s “Afrika Eye Film Festival” recently visited Bristol’s Cube Microplex - an independent and not-for-profit cinema, run entirely by volunteers - with the screening of two recent films focusing on the stories and lives of refugees, and the immense challenges they face. With absolute honesty and urgency, both documentaries pose an uncomfortable challenge to the world: they ‘re-humanise’ the refugee in a way that newspapers and media often fail to. Through the eyes of volunteers, asylum se

The Charles Causley Trust • 25th November 2021

Finnuala Brett: 'Notes From Quiet Summertime: A Chronology'

My name is Finnuala Brett and I am studying Liberal Arts at Bristol University. This piece is a refined amalgamation of diary entries that I wrote over the summer just gone. Journaling has recently become transformative for me as an opportunity for deep reflection and a way to grapple with feeling and experience.

An introspective diary that is intended to be neither wise nor intelligent; it is not anything other than itself and me.

I saw a dead bird today. Bike keys dangling between fingers, m

Heroica Website • 12th December 2023

On Openness and Nudity

This summer, I remembered what it meant to open myself to the world. I remembered with my full body, with the exaltation of bare flesh and vulnerability, and with what felt like a freedom I had forgotten. Open, like the unfolding fingers of a sleeping hand, caught in the sunlight. Like the gentle crook of an arm, soft skin inside, the nape of a neck where the hair falls away. Like the slit of an eye, glistening under lashes to watch the same leaking blue marry the sea and sky.

I had come to res