A new prize for climate change fiction.

Hay Festival launches a new prize that shines on a light on fiction addressing

When in 2016 Amitav Ghosh wrote in his book The Great Derangement that the western novel did not have the tools to tackle the subject of the encroaching climate catastrophe he may have had a point, but he was also surely aware he would spark something into life. Four years later, Kim Stanley Robinson, perhaps the contemporary big daddy bear of “what if…” novels, proclaimed casually on The Anthropocene podcast that nowadays “all novels are climate change novels”. As the truth of our planet’s woes has become inescapable, so novelists have turned to it for material. Now, in 2024, the publishing industry is launching the first climate change prize for fiction. This is a major development.