Dr Kevan Manwaring, senior lecturer on BA (Hons) Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), and course leader on AUB Online's MA Creative Writing course, is celebrating the release of Writing Ecofiction: Navigating the Challenges of Environmental Narrative.
The creative writing textbook, published by Palgrave Macmillan, introduces students to ecofiction, a genre of fictional tales and narrative writing that reflect important connections, dependencies, and interactions between people and their natural environments.
“Ecofiction, also known as ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi’, became popular in the 1970s as short story writers and novelists developed their own creative responses to the climate crisis," explains Kevan. "[The book] is a guide that explores a cross-section of genres and ways of writing about our world, as well as the ethical and technical challenges involved.
“Ecofiction is a genre that’s growing rapidly in popularity as environmental concerns become entwined with our own human narrative. I hope that this book helps writers of every level navigate the various worlds of ecofiction with confidence so we, the reader, can enjoy the subsequent works produced.”
Exploring themes in environmental writing such as climate change, activism, nature writing and the non-human, Writing Ecofiction offers a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, 21 interviews with a wide range of international authors, literary criticism, and creative writing exercises. Each chapter includes an overview of writing styles and approaches, with further reading and writing activities offered.
“The book will be a core text of 'Writing in the Anthropocene', one of the units of the MA Creative Writing course and will hopefully become a core text on other reading lists of similar programmes around the world," says Kevan. "As well writing this book for students on upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses who are writing modules on the environment, I’ve also written this for independent writers looking to expand their skill set."
