Speakers
Climate change is already here, woven into the mundane and the everyday. This conversation on the novel Under Water explores what literary fiction can capture about the natural world that dystopian “cli-fi” often cannot. It touches on the limits and possibilities of fiction when it comes to representing the environment, climate change, and grief.
The novel moves between two large-scale disasters, but it lingers longest on something smaller: the slow, gradual, often invisible changes to local ecosystems, what critic Rob Nixon called “slow violence.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argued that serious literary fiction has largely failed to represent climate change at all, leaving the subject to genre and spectacle. Under Water is offered as an answer to that gap, fiction that holds both the freak event and the quiet, cumulative truth of a changing world.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Tara Menon
Keshava Guha
Keshava Guha was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. He studied history and politics at Harvard, and writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes regularly on politics, literature and sport for a host of publications.
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