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Get to know the authors behind the shortlist! We interviewed each of the shortlisted writers to find out more about their hopes for their novels, how they feel about Climate Fiction and what books inspired them in their creativity.
Kaliane Bradley
THE MINISTRY OF TIME
1. What are your thoughts on being shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize?
I am very excited to be in such great company, as I was on the excellent longlist. It’s an important new prize and I’m delighted to be part of it.
2. What do you hope readers take away from your reading your novel?
That hope is still possible, that we can learn from mistakes, that the future isn’t yet decided.
3. Why do you think novels are important in tackling the climate crisis?
I think any art form can encourage us to think of ourselves as engaged in the creative, collaborative act of imagining possible futures for our planet.
4. Is there a novel that changed the way you see the world in terms of environmental or climate issues?
J.G. Ballard’s entire environmental trilogy, but especially THE DROUGHT.
Abi Daré
AND SO I ROAR
1. What are your thoughts on being shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize?
I’m truly honoured to see AND SO I ROAR recognised in this way. Climate fiction is often rooted in the Global North, so having a story set in Africa acknowledged like this means a great deal. Africa accounts for just 4 per percent of global carbon emissions yet faces some of the harshest effects of the climate crisis. A prize like this matters because it creates space for stories that show how deeply connected we all are and how fiction can open hearts where data alone might struggle.
2. What do you hope readers take away from your reading your novel?
I hope AND SO I ROAR helps readers see how the climate crisis is unfolding in another part of the world, often painfully and without making the news. I wanted to show the people behind the headlines: families losing their homes, communities adapting in unexpected ways, belief systems clashing with hard facts, and young girls still daring to dream. I also hope readers feel the resilience, the strength, and the beautiful, flawed, and fractured human relationships that run through the story.
3. Why do you think novels are important in tackling the climate crisis?
Stories make us feel. Novels take big, overwhelming issues and place them in the hands of people we come to know and care about. We stop seeing the climate crisis as numbers or headlines and start seeing it as the lived reality of families, communities, and individuals with hopes and fears. When you walk beside a character facing drought, or losing their home, or trying to protect their child from a harsh new world, something shifts inside you. That, I think, is fiction’s greatest power: that ability to soften the distance between us, to create empathy that drives change.
4. Is there a novel that changed the way you see the world in terms of environmental or climate issues?
I’ve probably watched more films than read books on this, but THE FOUR WINDS by Kristin Hannah immediately comes to mind. The novel captures the fury of drought and environmental collapse during the Dust Bowl in a way that feels heartbreakingly real. Through the eyes of one woman and her family, you feel the wrath of nature and the strength it takes to survive it.
Roz Dineen
BRIEFLY VERY BEAUTIFUL
1. What are your thoughts on being shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize?
I am so happy and honoured to be on this shortlist. It feels very special. I think this is an important prize: the earth is in crisis and we must to attend to it and refine our senses towards it. Being shortlisted is also bound-up with a welcome portion of relief. So often when I was writing I would be pinballed between various doubts and questions: Is this interesting? Does this even make sense? Is this okay? Am I allowed to do this? Am I getting the environmental part right? Being nominated for this prize, in such incredible company, felt like a big sigh; like someone taking me aside to say, what you wrote was okay.
2. What do you hope readers take away from your reading your novel?
I wanted to convey the experience of a single character, whom I loved and feared for. Initially, I had no idea what people would take away from the book other than the feeling of being in this woman’s company. But now I hope the larger takeaway is something like this: We have to honour one another. We must respect and look after each other. I wanted to show in this novel that for a long time capitalist society has normalised (or at least provided ways to cover-up) some quite dark and twisted behaviour in professional and familial and romantic relationships. And I wanted to show that the ways we have mistreated one another are mirrored in the ways we have mistreated earth; so that it comes as no surprise when the main character in my book lifts her eyes from the manipulative and exploitative relationships she has been part of, only to find herself in a physical landscape that has been so malignly manipulated and exploited it is dangerous to live in, barely habitable. I think I wanted readers to take away the idea that if we learn to better honour and respect ourselves, and each other, we might then naturally begin to honour and respect the earth, too.
I also wanted to say something about hope with this book. I saw the Pope tweeted recently (which is odd, because I’m pretty sure I don’t follow the Pope or look at X anymore): “Hope is not utopian.” I think he was saying that in the current moment it might seem naïve to be hopeful, but it isn’t. It is not crazy to be hopeful, nor does it make you a fantasist. Hope is not utopian. It is rarely triumphant. It is rarely joyous. Hope is taking a cool, clear-eyed view of the surrounding conditions and still deciding to reach for the good in oneself, and the good in others, and build from there. Hope is quiet and resourceful and hard won. I think I wanted readers of my book to take away this kind of hope.
3. Why do you think novels are important in tackling the climate crisis?
It can be difficult to convey information about the climate crisis without coming across as didactic, or doom-mongering. As we all know, didacticism and doom are not very appealing. I did years of research before writing this book. The world of the book is based on existing and likely outcomes, and data. But I put all the research down and let it slip into the background when I started writing.
If you told me I had to read a 400-page text about the realities of the climate crisis tonight, I’d say; yes, I know I should read that, but not tonight. Tonight I need to relax, life is full of responsibilities and it’s stressful. I’ll read it tomorrow. But if you said to me: read this story about these characters who are gorgeous, and troubled, and trying; read about this adventure; read about how the light still falls heavenly on a child’s face, and children still find ways to play and laugh, even while the world burns; read about sex, and drugs, and betrayal, and weddings that take place beside poisoned rivers; read about the sort of transformations of character and ritual and society that must come about if we are ever to grapple with the climate crisis and build a new world – then, yes, okay, for sure, I’ll read that tonight. Climate fiction has the potential to engage all our faculties – it can raise your heart beat, blow your mind, expand your soul – it can make us bodily alert to the crisis without being prescriptive, didactic or doom-laden.
4. Is there a novel that changed the way you see the world in terms of environmental or climate issues?
THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler; Florida by Lauren Groff, and THE DROWNED WORLD by J. G. Ballard – these books are all set in a world made weird by the climate. They showed me that the possibilities of grappling with the environment in fiction were urgent and rich.
Samantha Harvey
ORBITAL
1. What are your thoughts on being shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize?
I’m grateful, proud and honoured. I didn’t set out to write ‘climate fiction’ (whatever that might be) but I did set out to write a novel that might do in words what a song or prayer or painting might do in wonderstruck observation of our planet. I hope this prize might provide a focus for the many, many people who care about climate change and who are feeling varying degrees of despair at state-led lack of action – somewhere we can come together through reading and navigate our despair and aspiration.
2. What do you hope readers take away from your reading your novel?
That, in the inhospitality of space, we are fortunate beyond belief to have this temperate, mellow, fertile, improbably shimmering sphere of blue-green to call our home. How we respond to that recognition is up to each of us, and to all of us collectively.
3. Why do you think novels are important in tackling the climate crisis?
I think I’d ask a slightly different question: how can any contemporary novel, set more or less in the present day, not tackle the climate crisis in some way? Whether it makes a difference that it does is for debate. But this crisis is existential, by which I mean it permeates every corner of our existence and our experience of being alive here and now. Novels are records of the time in which they’re written and I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to write or even conceptualise a novel that doesn’t testify to this crisis, however directly or obliquely. And every testimony is another voice in the chorus. To quote Laurie Anderson: this is the time, and this is the record of the time.
4. Is there a novel that changed the way you see the world in terms of environmental or climate issues?
A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY by JL Carr. This book was the blueprint for ORBITAL. It has a stealthy power; it seems such an easy read, but I finished it and wept, really wept. There are all the horrors we create for ourselves, in this case the horror of war, and when we emerge from it there’s birdsong, the gentle green slope of a valley, the clear night sky, and silence. Not backdrop, not consolation, but fundamental condition for meaningful existence.
Téa Obreht
THE MORNINGSIDE
1. What are your thoughts on being shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize?
I’m floored to be included. Many of the books on the shortlist were among my favorite reads of the past year, and to see my own work listed alongside them is a profound honor.
2. What do you hope readers take away from your reading your novel?
I hope readers leave THE MORNINGSIDE thinking about folklore, community, and human resilience, and about how our lives are affected, in ways we sometimes don’t even realize, by the stories that precede us.
3. Why do you think novels are important in tackling the climate crisis?
In the West, we have been conditioned, by powers whom such conditioning benefits, to think of the climate crisis as something that is still approaching. Novels tackling the subject, I hope, ask us to face the reality that it has already been here for some time, and that communities across the globe have already been forced to grapple with its effects socially, economically, technologically, and narratively. Every facet of human existence is already being, and will certainly be, shaped by it. The best climate fiction helps us metabolize our shared present and imagine our shared future.
4. Is there a novel that changed the way you see the world in terms of environmental or climate issues?
There are many, but Jenny Offill’s masterpiece, WEATHER, stands out as one of the finest and most anxiety-inducing.
The shortlist was announced on 19 March 2025.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on 14 May 2025