Talk: Endangered Alphabets and the Future of Writing

In 2009, writer/guitarist/soccer coach Tim Brookes discovered that many of the world’s minority alphabets were being driven out of existence, so he decided to try to save them - by teaching himself to carve and preserving them in beautiful woods.

Within four years he had created the Endangered Alphabets Project; within ten years he had exhibited his carvings and spoken about the crisis of script loss all over the world; by 2021 he had identified every form of writing in use across the globe and had promoted more than 100 minority cultures through revitalizing their unique and fascinating forms of writing.

In the process he has radically redefined writing itself and discovered how much is at stake today as digital tools and AI threaten the extinction of the art of writing by hand. His talk will encompass all these phases of his work, illustrated by his remarkable carved art.

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Tim Brookes was born in England and educated at Oxford before moving to the United States in 1980. An editor, guitarist, teacher, soccer coach and author of 23 books and numerous articles and essays, he founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 with his first exhibition of carvings in indigenous and minority scripts.

Since then he has exhibited and spoken at more than 150 colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and galleries including The Barbican Center, West den Haag, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, while working with a wide range of cultures to create games and educational materials for learning and promoting minority scripts. His latest books are An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets and By Hand: Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? 

After 50 years in the US, he has just moved back to Cambridge, England.