Before writing this book, my understanding of climate change was shaped by headlines, policy debates, and the occasional reminder to put the correct bin out on collection day. I initially set out to tell a human story—about a girl fighting for an education, her educated older friend with secrets of her own, and the rural women navigating inequality in Nigeria.
But it quickly became clear that the environment was impossible to ignore. It was raw with grief, with wounds that bled into everything I was researching.
Climate injustice is felt more than understood in many parts of rural Africa. For many rural women, climate change is a lived reality. It’s the reason a girl misses school to fetch water and is assaulted on the way. It’s why her sister is married off—because the farm has failed, and her bride price becomes the crop. It’s why entire families are forced to flee the land they’ve called home for generations. And I daresay it’s part of why some Western nations struggle with migration—because people are fleeing places devastated by climate change.
This prize matters because fiction lets us bear witness and makes the abstract real. It gets under your skin and moves the heart in a way data alone cannot.
These stories belong to people who did the least to cause the climate crisis, yet we rarely hear their voices. Policies, meetings, conferences, data, and pledges are necessary. But they cannot be the only narrative. What do those numbers and events mean to Amina, standing in a dry riverbed in 2024, waiting for rain that may never come? We need targets and pledges, but we also need stories. How else will we understand what it means when Mamadu, a farmer, loses his land to a sandstorm and has nowhere left to go?
And So I Roar was inspired by love, rage, and necessity. Okay, it was partly inspired by my obsession with the show 24. But mostly, it came from an urgent need to speak to those whose lives are already being shaped, disrupted, and erased by the climate crisis.
This is to remind us that the clock is ticking, and we must act now.
I hope the millions of women and girls finding their louding voices, and so many others around the world struggling daily with the shocks of climate change, won’t have to roar for the world to finally pay attention.