Sunday, January 28, 2018

Clifi - Climate Fiction in Children's Literature

So this is interesting! Cli-fi is a new category in children's and Young Adult fiction. I've read nearly everything by writer Paolo Bacigalupi who writes intelligent and well-researched thrillers about a future irrevocably altered by climate disaster and corporate greed. These include the gripping Drowned Cities YA trilogy and the adult novels The Water Knife and The Windup Girl.



Children's literature academia is catching up and Cli-fi is the theme of the 2019 MLA Conference, which just put out a call for for papers, suggesting the following topics:

- Children’s and YA cli-fi in the media
- Children’s and YA cli-fi and climate change awareness/activism
- Conventions and characteristics of the genre
- Social and environmental justice in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Corporate corruption in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Depictions of altered geographies
- Kinship/community in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Resilience in children’s and YA cli-fi