‘Exceptional imagination and craft’ unite 2026 Climate Fiction Prize shortlist

Six books have been shortlisted for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize, including the Booker Prize-longlisted Endling by Maria Reva (Virago) and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books).

Also shortlisted for the £10,000 prize are Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus), The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster) and Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books).

This year’s judging panel is chaired by Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic at the Guardian and former literary editor of the Independent. She is joined by award-winning novelists Kit de Waal and Jessie Greengrass, as well as Dr Friederike Otto, professor in climate science at Imperial College London and co-founder of the World Weather Attribution initiative, and Simon Savidge, a broadcaster and presenter with a YouTube channel called Savidge Reads.

Set in the domestic sphere in increasingly artificial or altered worlds, Hum and Awake in the Floating City “explore community, compassion and what it is that makes us human”, the judges said, while the political The Tiger’s Share “vividly depicts how colonialism and patriarchal structures fuel the climate crisis”.

The Book of Records “humanises climate migration through the prism of finding community amongst oppression”, they said, while the  “prescient” Endling “looks at current competing crises, stressing the interconnectedness between conflict and climate”. Western adventure Dusk, meanwhile, is described as a “remarkable parable about finding love and redemption in healing our relationship with the natural world”.

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