The authors speaking out about the climate crisis

It is a weird time for the book industry: two tech companies, Microsoft and ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, have announced that they’re going to start publishing books. Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced this week that it has made a deal to allow some of its titles to be used for AI training, and among the non-experts who participated in a recent study, AI poems rated higher than human-written ones.

But as technology and literature become more intertwined than ever, many authors are more concerned with the physical world – and how to save it from climate destruction. More on that right after this week’s picks, and scroll down to read about the books that writer Edward Posnett – who wrote for this weekend’s Saturday magazine about the skiing accident that left him unable to read – has been enjoying lately.

Richard Flanagan caused a stir on 19 November when, having been announced as winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for his book Question 7, he used his speech (pre-recorded, as the author was trekking in the Tasmanian rainforest on the day of the ceremony) to say that he would not be accepting the £50,000 prize money – for now at least.

The sponsor of the prestigious nonfiction prize, investment management company Baillie Gifford, has been the subject of controversy in recent years. Owing to its investments in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel, literary festival boycotts were organised by campaign group Fossil Free Books, which led to the termination of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals. The company’s contract to sponsor the nonfiction prize until the end of 2025 has remained in place – but is yet to be renewed.

“I can’t write a book such as Question 7, which in part deals with the catastrophe of climate, with the destruction and vanishing of the world I love, and not mention it and not act upon it,” Flanagan told Alex Clark in an interview on 20 November.

The Australian author has asked to speak to Baillie Gifford’s board so that he can “describe how fossil fuels are destroying our country”, with the hope that the fund manager will share a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables, in which case he would be willing to accept the prize money.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose book A Man of Two Faces was also up for the prize, announced after Flanagan’s speech that he would be donating the £5,000 he received for being on the shortlist to the literary organisation We Are Not Numbers, which publishes the poetry and prose of Palestinians from Gaza.

“It’s wonderful that Baillie Gifford has sponsored the prize,” the Pulitzer prize-winning author posted on Instagram. “More wealthy people and corporations should support literature. But it’s also true that Baillie Gifford should divest from fossil fuels and its investments in Israeli companies that benefit from the occupation of Palestine.”

How Baillie Gifford will respond to Flanagan and Thanh Nguyen’s calls remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Amitav Ghosh, who has long been a leading figure among authors concerned about climate breakdown, has also been speaking out this week. The Indian author told Bloomberg he wishes countries would channel the money they are spending on wars towards combatting the crisis.

Responding to the discussions currently happening at Cop29, Ghosh said that he was not holding out hope for the kind of financial commitments needed to fund a proper resistance to the climate emergency. Criticising leaders of rich nations, the author said: “They say, ‘We don’t have money,’ but then suddenly they’re spending trillions on armaments. So that shows you very clearly where their priorities are.”

The climate crisis is a key concern for this year’s Booker winner Samantha Harvey. When her novel Orbital was announced as winner last week, she dedicated her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

And clearly readers want more writing that addresses this issue, too: Orbital has broken records by becoming the first Booker novel to become the UK No 1 bestseller in the week of its win.

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything”, reads one line from Orbital. With more focus on books like this and the questions they raise, perhaps we can start moving towards real change. As Flanagan puts it: “As each of us is guilty, each of us too bears a responsibility to act.”

Not long ago I moved to Scotland, and by chance I picked up a dog-eared copy of poet Alisdair Maclean’s account of life in a crofting community on the west coast of Scotland, Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, drawing on his father’s journals. At the time I did not know Maclean’s work, but his beautiful book made me reconsider much of what I thought I knew about Scottish history. His book made me see the landscape around me anew, and asks resonant questions about tradition, inheritance, parental obligation and when to let go; questions that are on my mind, having recently become a parent myself.

I am married to an Italian, who regularly passes me excellent books in her language. One of them was the Italian novelist Dacia Maraini’s wonderful memoir, La Nave per Kobe (an English translation, The Ship for Kobe, is due to be published next year). In 1938, when she was just two, Maraini and her family moved to Japan, living in Hokkaido and Kyoto before being deported to a POW camp in Nagoya in 1943. Like Maclean, Maraini builds a picture of the past through a parent’s writings, in this case the moving and tender diary of her mother, the Sicilian artist Topazia Alliata. It’s a quiet and sensitive book, concerned with the granular details of family relationships and domestic life, all while great and terrifying tectonic shifts are happening in the background.