Climate change with Amitav Ghosh and Aaron Thier – books podcast

Amitav Ghosh discusses the failure of literary culture to confront climate change, while Aaron Thier explains how his novel Mr Eternity reflects current fears

As the US electorate hands the keys of the White House to a man who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax, the prospects for the environment have never looked so bleak. The world seems to be hurtling further into climate crisis – and yet the silence on the greatest single issue of our times from serious novelists is deafening.

The writer Amitav Ghosh explores why the tools of contemporary fiction are so unsuitable for tackling climate change, and how the extraordinary events of the Anthropocene challenge ideas of gradual progress that have formed the bedrock of western culture since the Enlightenment. Writers must throw off the constraints of realism, he argues, if they are to confront our slide into catastrophe.