Internationally renowned novelist joins Leicester’s top academics to discuss why climate change has been banished from fiction books

Distinguished author and Booker prize nominee, Dr Amitav Ghosh, will join top scientists and a world-leading historian to explore how the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences have shaped, and can shape, our thinking about the climate emergency.

‘The Climate Emergency: Creating a Dialogue Between Science and The Arts’ is a free online public event, which will take place at 6pm on Tuesday 7th June. It will feature a discussion between globally renowned novelist and climate writer Amitav Ghosh - who is known both for his wide-ranging novels and for his works on the climate emergency and how colonial histories and global inequalities have shaped attitudes to climate change - and a panel of experts from the University of Leicester.

“I very much look forward to this conversation at the University of Leicester, with scholars who have shared interests. I very much enjoyed my visit there some years ago, and it will be a pleasure to continue some of the discussions I had then. At this critical moment of our planetary crisis it is of the utmost importance to examine the historical roots of our current predicament.”

The panel will be chaired by Professor Clare Anderson, whose world-leading research explores histories of colonial governance, labour extraction and oppression, and their legacies in the world today. She’ll be joined by Professors Mark Williams and Caroline Upton. Professor Williams is a palaeontologist and former scientist with the British Geological and British Antarctic surveys, who studies the Earth’s life support systems and in particular how they are being degraded by human impacts. Professor Upton’s research explores the dynamic interactions between policy, practice and rural livelihoods in the context of debates around environmental governance, environmental justice, ecosystem services and climate change.

The event has been created by the Centre for New Writing, Literary Leicester festival, and The Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies. Tickets are free but people are encouraged to register via Eventbrite.