Amitav Ghosh

Because really now we are no longer writing about the planetary crisis.

We are writing from within the planetary crisis.

So in one way or the other, it is going to manifest, certainly in everything I write.

You know, many people have pointed this out, and they've said that he's obviously read my book or whatever.

I don't know.

I can't say.

I haven't read his book yet.

Yeah, certainly, since in the last 10 years, there's been a huge outpouring of writing about the planetary crisis.

But it's not that people weren't writing about these issues before.

They were.

But the problem was that the broader literary ecosystem tended to marginalize those voices, tended not to foreground, as it were, that kind of writing, which was generally treated as science fiction or writing fantasy or something like that.

But that is what has really changed, I think, over the last few years, that it's no longer possible to completely marginalize that kind of writing.

And then there's another book that really sort of runs parallel to my way of thinking.

The writer is Ruth Ozeki.

Her writing is just so interesting and important.

She is a Zen Buddhist practitioner.

And I think what she is trying to do is so much like I'm trying to do, you know, which is somehow to restore voice and agency to the non-human world.

I mean, I think of that as being the great literary challenge of our time.

Wonderful to talk to you, Claire.

Thank you so much for having me.