I’m a big reader so I was very excited that Climate Curious featured climate fiction this month. The first time I mentioned cli-fi or climate fiction to a colleague, they looked at me confused and asked, what is cli-fi? I found it surprisingly hard to define – is it a story that directly features the climate crisis in the plot? Or is it a story where the climate or environmental crises are somewhere – anywhere – in the book? Does that make it more of dystopian fiction or science fiction then? Or technically could all fiction written today be a form of climate fiction?
Luckily, I can now direct folks directly to the Climate Fiction Prize and how they define climate fiction. Begun in 2025, the Climate Fiction Prize is a new literary award that celebrates the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis. For them, they define climate fiction as: “stories that engage… with the climate crisis and our response to it”. They think about it as a lens through which to see literature, saying:
“Climate fiction is not a genre in and of itself but rather a lens through which to view literature – how is the preeminent challenge of our times reflected in the fiction being written today? […] Any fiction genre might fall under the climate fiction umbrella, much as all human experience will be shaped by the crisis unfolding around us.”
When I read this definition of climate fiction, I was pleased. Some of my favourite “climate” books have run the gamut from contemporary literature you’d find in a bookshop’s window to hardcore science fiction and much in between. For me, literature – really like any artform – is a place where we can explore the most important issues of the day without the pressure of offering easy answers or solutions like non-fiction or an academic report needs to. Seeing cli-fi as less of a genre and more of a lens, encourages writers (and readers) to explore the climate and environmental crises in whatever way makes sense to them.
The Climate Fiction Prize was, of course, partly created to help shift cultural narratives on the climate crisis. The prize showcases authors that are exploring the climate crisis and show readers what our individual or collective responses may be. As someone who works in climate communications and loves reading, I’m excited by such efforts to recognise how powerful fiction is in imagining the future and our place in it.
Introducing Hum by Helen Philips
The winner of this year’s Climate Fiction Prize is Hum by Helen Philips. The speculative fiction novel centres on a family in a near future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums”. The protagonist, May, a mother, loses her job to artificial intelligence and she’s desperate to resolve her family’s debt. She decides to become a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face, so it cannot be recognised by surveillance. May then splurges a significant portion of these hard won funds to gain access to one of the last remaining green spaces called the Botanical Gardens. The judges celebrated Hum’s urgency, the nuance of the writing and the deeply connected threads of love, community and family that shine through.
In Helen’s Climate Curious episode, Could this literary genre help protect the planet?, I was struck by how open and honest she was about the driving force behind the novel:
“When I was setting out to write Hum, I was anxious about climate change. I was anxious about artificial intelligence. I was anxious about surveillance and consumption culture and really writ large the future we are creating for our children. So all of those anxieties, for better or worse, propelled me into writing this book.”
Anxiety about the future and eco-anxiety are felt by many of us and seeing how Helen was able to weave those concerns into her creative practice is both reassuring and inspiring. As she says later in the interview, writing about climate anxiety “gives me a way to share something with a reader so that we can be together in that anxiety rather than just each being in solitude in that.”
Helen goes on to explain that’s why she finds climate fiction so powerful. Specifically, how climate fiction can acknowledge the anxieties and concerns of readers and writers, allow them to feel connected to those who feel similarly and perhaps most importantly, open up the possibility that there could be a collective response to these issues. She says:
“For writers writing about climate change and for readers reading about climate change, there can be a cathartic quality to engaging with this subject matter and realizing that other people are concerned about it too, and feeling like there’s some kind of communal response that might be possible.”
Helen’s comments tie in beautifully with what the hope behind the Climate Fiction Prize – that fiction can help us to imagine different futures through stories – be it worlds we’d love to inhabit (or prefer to avoid).
Recommended Climate Fiction
There are now 10 novels from 2025 and 2026 shortlists for the Climate Fiction Prize. They are all brilliant, but to help narrow it down, we’ve pulled a few fav recommendations from the Climate Curious and TEDxLondon team.
#1 Hum by Helen Philips – Winner of the Climate Fiction Prize 2026
Naturally, don’t miss out on Hum by Helen Philips and listening to her Climate Curious episode. Our Executive Producer, Josie Colter, says “It’s a super powerful book. Kind of utopian and dystopian and despite that complexity an alarming amount of humor in it. I did find myself laughing quite a lot. And I fell in love with the robots, the Hums, which again brought up conflicting feelings”.
#2 And so I Roar by Abi Daré – Winner of the Climate Fiction Prize 2025
The inaugural winner of the Climate Fiction Prize, And so I Roar follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, where she is excited to finally enrol in school, to her home village where she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change.
In her powerful acceptance speech, Abi shares “For many rural women, climate change is a lived reality… These stories belong to people who did the least to cause the climate crisis, yet we rarely hear their voices. [The novel] came from an urgent need to speak to those whose lives are already being shaped, disrupted, and erased by the climate crisis.”
#3 The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – Shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2025, Longlisted Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025
A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test whether time-travel is feasible. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, supporting and monitoring expat ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures.
Recommended by me (Tara, Head of Comms): “The Ministry of Time may seem like a pacy fantasy, sci-fi romp about the possibilities of time travel, until suddenly the climate crisis and its impact on our future takes centre stage. It’s a brilliant debut with memorable characters and a thrilling plot.”
#4 Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan – Shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. But when the health of Mia – a prickly, elderly lady Bo cares for – deteriorates, Bo determines to honour their disappearing world and the woman who brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.
Executive Producer, Josie, highly recommends Awake in the Floating City – “I found the theme of caregiving in a changing ecological landscape so compelling; especially how compassion and care can endlessly expand when other systems like capitalism collapse. The novel shows how climate change can exert huge pressure on our relationships, but also how human have such a strong ability to endure that.”
#5 Orbital By Samantha Harvey – Winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2025
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe.
A highly recommended book and loved by many readers, Orbital is a meditative novel sharing life onboard a spacecraft – but also so much more. The observations of the crew and Harvey’s poetic prose ask us to consider our planet, its place in the universe and to see our planet from an entirely different perspective – one that is borderless and interlinked.
Finally, I wanted to throw in a cheeky extra recommendation that introduced me to climate fiction mixing with science fiction many years ago: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, Winner of the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award & a Sunday Times Science Fiction Novel of the Year.
Hopefully you’re as excited as we are to get reading some of these brilliant novels. At Climate Curious, we’re committed to sharing stories that help us imagine the future – speculative, dystopian, hopeful or what it may be – and we’ll be sure to keep you all up to date with the next recommended climate fiction reads.
