Writing about the environment and climate change in fiction and non-fiction.

Thursday 30 March 2023, 1pm-2.20 pm, Milgate Seminar Room, AD Hope

How do we write compelling fiction that also recognises the epochal event of the Anthropocene? This seminar will explore the politics and aesthetics of writing about the environment and the climate emergency in fiction and non-fiction. We will look at examples from key writers as well as refer to students’ work-in-progress and literary influences. Jean will give a short talk and then open the seminar up to discussion and if appropriate writing exercises. 

Professor Jean McNeil has published fifteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. She is Professor of Creative Writing and directs the programme at the University of East Anglia in Norfolk, UK. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016.  She also collaborates with visual artists and has curated two international exhibitions on the Anthropocene, in Barcelona, Spain in 2020, and forthcoming in Andorra in June 2023.