Author Q&A
In this series of Q&As, the Climate Fiction Prize talks to each of the shortlisted writers about all things climate, fiction and the inspiration behind their novel.
- How would you summarise your book in one sentence?
A grieving artist cares for her 130-year-old neighbor in a future drowned San Francisco.
- What inspired you to write this story?
Living through wildfires, droughts, and floods, and knowing worse is to come. Worrying about the world that younger generations will inherit and feeling the absence of older generations. Witnessing, receiving, and practicing the labor of care.
- Did you set out to write a story about climate or did those themes develop through
the writing process?
The never-ending rain was present at the beginning as an image, a soundscape. But pretty quickly, I realized that the world of the book was absolutely shaped by climate concerns. The characters have adapted somewhat to deteriorating conditions, but
they’re grieving the people and places that have literally washed away over years of extreme weather.
- What’s one book you think readers should pick up after they finish your novel?
Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
- What would you say to a reader looking for a sense of hope in turbulent times?
Keep looking after the people and places you love, even as they transform, even as they disappear.
- How do you think storytelling can shape our response to the climate crisis and our sense of what future is possible?
Stories allow us to bring together entities that might never meet (in our linear experience of time) and explore the deep connections between them. Stories illuminate how we live—how we think, mess up, remember, and love. That type of knowledge doesn’t show up in policy or official records, but it’s an essential and enduring part of humanity. How we mess up and love now is shaping the world to come.
- What’s the one piece of advice you would give to a writer facing a blank page?
Name what you love and write what is beautiful and difficult about it. Let it be strange, meandering, and true.
- The care for the most vulnerable in times of unimaginable danger has seen humanity survive the worst of catastrophes from the pandemic to war and famine. It’s explored so beautifully in your novel in the face of climate events that seem to be at our doorstep. How do you think these precious connections between human beings can see us through this moment in time of climate and humanitarian crises?
The book begins with one neighbor asking another for help. It’s a story we all know: everywhere, neighbors are looking out for one another, through environmental disaster, state-sanctioned violence, illness, and grief. We’re in a frightening moment of compounding crises. And we’re in a moment of tremendous care, too. Our lives are inextricably entangled. How do we show up in the face of need? And what world do we make in the process, together?