The Climate Fiction Prize 2026 Shortlist

The Conduit hosted this month a special reading from six novels shorlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026. The new literary award seeks to showcase powerful stories that depict the human response to climate change; how it impacts us and how society responds.

The shortlist was chosen by the five judges: Arifa Akbar, Chief Theatre Critic at The Guardian and former literary editor of The Independent; novelists Kit de Waal (The Best of Everything and My Name is Leon) and Jessie Greengrass (The High House and Sight); leading climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London and co-founder of the World Weather Attribution initiative; and Simon Savidge a bibliophile, broadcaster and presenter.

Descriptions and links to where you can buy the novels can be found below:

1. The Book of Records: A Novel by Madeleine Thien

Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.

2. The Tiger’s Share, by Keshava Guha

The fiercest wars are fought between siblings. Tara, is          everything her younger brother isn’t: dedicated, independent, thriving. When their father retires, he summons them to a meeting. But what he has to say threatens to tear the family apart.

3. Endling, by Maria Reva

Yeva is a maverick Ukrainian scientist, trying and failing to breed rare snails while dating plenty of men – not for love, but to fund her work. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism.

So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.

4. Dusk, by Robbie Arnott

With escaped Puma, Dusk, roaming the distant highlands, outcast twins Iris and Floyd decide to join the hunt.

As they journey up into the wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people than they imagined. Forced to make an uneasy alliance with a fellow tracker, the twins’ lifelong bond is put at risk. And as the trio close in on their prey, it becomes clear where the true danger lies.

5. Hum, by Helen Phillips

In a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

A novel that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.