A new prize for fiction engaging with the climate crisis, The Climate Fiction Prize, will be launched at this year’s Hay Festival (23rd May to 2nd June). The award, supported by storytelling organisation Climate Spring, will give £10,000 to the winner.
The first award will be made in spring 2025.
The prize’s aim is described as being to showcase novels of powerful literary merit and to solidify, grow and expand fiction that engages with the climate crisis. The founders are Leo Barasi, author of The Climate Majority, Rose Goddard, executive director at Wimbledon BookFest and former prize manager of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Imran Khan, former head of public engagement at the Wellcome Trust, now at UC Berkeley.
In the prize’s inaugural year, writer Madeleine Bunting will be chair of judges, and joined by climate justice activist and writer Tori Tsui, author Nicola Chester, whose On Gallows Down was shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize, and Andy Fryers, Hay Festival’s sustainability director. They will all appear in a panel event to launch the prize to the public at Hay Festival on Sunday 2nd June.
Bunting said: “Change starts with the imagination and no subject so urgently needs new stories of repair and care than the climate crisis, and the value of this prize is to recognise new talent and help promote it to a wider audience, provoking debate and stimulating others authors to tackle this vital task of imagining what’s possible.”
Lucy Stone, founder and executive director of Climate Spring, added: “We are thrilled to be supporting the world’s first literary prize for climate fiction, celebrating innovative writers with new stories. We are in a moment of cultural paralysis where concerns about climate lead to despair not action. Fiction can unlock this paralysis; through storytelling we step into another person’s shoes, or feel empowered by imagining more compelling visions of the future. The climate story isn’t only a story of damage but the transformation and repair of ourselves as much as the environment.”
Submissions will open on Monday, 3rd June 2024, with full submission details available then. The longlist and shortlist will be announced across autumn/winter with the £10,000 winner announced in spring 2025.
