Tony Birch

And I've never read a book which captures the voice, the theatricality, the drama and the pathos

And the nuance of growing up in that suburb at the time.

And every time I read a section from that book, I'm just mesmerised by Pio's ability to capture, like talk about sound, capture both sound and silence.

It's a remarkable book.

Jonathan Franzen champions that book in an essay of his.

I remember first reading that line and thinking, I'm in.

This book is mad.

Well, I think that cli-fi is the word that's used for sort of climate science fiction writing.

I think if thinking about Inga Simpson, I think ecofiction would be probably the more appropriate term.

Or I don't know if there's such a term as nature fiction, but she's certainly a writer in this case who's dealing with ecologies, threatened and damaged landscapes and applying a fictional brush to that.

So I don't really mind.

I think for me, the interesting issue, Kate, is that the place of this genre or these types of fiction in Australia at the moment and globally, you may, or some of our listeners may often hear the point that we should all be thinking and writing about climate change in our fiction.

It should be the central issue that we should be concerned about.

And

I don't agree with that or I think it's misplaced, but certainly there are a lot of writers who are now working very closely with these issues and for very good reason that the planet is under great threat at the moment of damage to ecologies and to the climate.

No, I don't actually.

Look, there are two ways to look at it.

There is one argument, The Great Derangement by Anitav Ghosh.

Yeah.

Yes, which argued that we should all be writing about climate.