Date: 11th June 2024

Time: 1 pm GMT/ 6:30 pm IST

In this last episode of the ongoing webinar series on climate fiction, we consider The Future of Climate Fiction from South Asia.

New work on the planetary climate crisis continues to appear. In the concluding fifth episode, we will hear from the author of a collection of climate themed stories, Biopeculiar, Gigi Ganguly. Next, Navin Weeraratne will speak about his own writing as well as trends in Sri Lankan climate fiction. To round off the discussion, SF scholar Atanu Bhattacharya will explore contemporary directions in Bangla climate fiction.

Amit R. Baishya: Amit R. Baishya is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018). He is the co-editor of two volumes–Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019)–and two journal special issues–“Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman” (Postcolonial Studies, 2022) and “Insides-Outsides: Anglophone Literature from Northeast India” (South Asian Review, 2023). He has translated Debendranath Acharya's novel on the forgotten long march from Burma to India, Jangam (Vitasta, 2018), from Assamese to English and is currently completing his second monograph Attunements to Others: The Anthropocene in Contemporary Indian Anglophone Literature.

Gigi Ganguly: Gigi Ganguly has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick in Ireland. Her first book, a novella titled One Arm Shorter Than The Other, was published by Atthis Arts in 2022. Her second book, a short story collection titled Biopeculiar, was published by Westland in 2024. She is currently working on a novel about AI and consciousness.

Navin Weeraratne: Navin Weeraratne is a professional miniature painter. That is to say,he's not miniature, but he paints miniatures - toy soldiers to be precise. People do indeed pay him to do this. He also writes Hard Science Fiction, and is the author of Zeelam, the Hundred Gram Mission, and Planet 9. He plans to escape climate change by growing his own vegetables in the mountains, where his neighbor, fellow Sri Lankan Science Fiction Writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, is doing just the same thing across the street. They're really doing this. Sri Lankans are mad.
Atanu Bhattacharya: Atanu Bhattacharya teaches in the Department of English Studies at Central University of Gujarat and researches Science Fiction in Bengal.