Dr Harry Whitehead School of Arts, Media and Communication, Director of the Centre for New Writing & the Literary Leicester Festival.
In this spotlight, LIAS Associate Fellow Dr Harry Whitehead shares insights into his work on the environmental crisis, exploring how creative writing and the arts more broadly can play a vital role in communicating scientific discourse more effectively.
Back in 2016, the novelist Amitav Ghosh described modern fiction’s failure to engage with climate change as a ‘great derangement.’ Things are certainly changing, with many more “climate fiction” novels now in print. But do they constitute no more than, as Kate Rigby puts it (channelling Theodor Adorno), ‘idle chatter’. Or can they be more? In the past few years I’ve become interested in how the arts can help contribute to disseminating the global environmental crisis, the better to increase pro-environmental behaviour. With LIAS ‘Into the City’ funding, I’ve been putting together a project, provisionally titled ‘Creative Climates: Creatively Communicating the Environmental Crisis’, which will link arts organisations and artists with local environmental researchers, producing new art based on that research, and monitoring audience response. This will hopefully lead toward new templates for arts organisations, charities, councils and government to model arts projects to inform and enact change.
Meanwhile, as a creative writer, I’m also engaging with the subject. My new novel, White Road (Claret), published on 8th September, is an ‘eco-thriller’ telling the story of an offshore oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter’s setting in, and the environmental catastrophe that follows. It’s also a polar adventure story about the Coast Guard operative, Carrie Essler, lost presumed dead after the accident, who must find her back to civilisation through the beautiful but nightmarish landscape, the oil killing everything just beneath the pristine ice. But who was responsible for the accident – was it corporate negligence or eco-activist terror? I’m travelling the literary festivals on tour right now, fascinated to hear people’s responses.
With LIAS financial ‘follow-on” support, I’ve just spent a month in Ladakh, India, as an artist in residence at an arts organisation in the Himalayas. My next novel will tell the story of a film crew making a tyre advert high in the mountain wilds and the guide who sets about to destroy their plans and them, appalled by the crassness of the project. The wider theme is Himalayan glacial retreat, the increased risk of floods and future water wars. Thanks to LIAS, I was able to visit a key glacier being monitored by satellite as it diminishes at alarming speed.
Also, LIAS’s support also allowed me to offer creative writing workshops to Buddhist writers in the capital Leh, and also to Shia Muslim writers in the smaller town of Kargil on the Pakistan border. This proved a fascinating opportunity to discuss my other research direction: the ways in which my subject, Creative Writing, risks a form of cultural imperialism as its growing popularity takes it ever further around the world: offering versions of storytelling particular to the Anglophone Global North as universal truths. I had many enthralling conversations on this topic with the writers I met.