“The past is a done deal, but if we play the cards of the present right, we can protect the future,” says Sasindie Subasinghe, one of the winners of our Climate Writing Awards. “Our actions today will steer the climate crisis into plight or resolution and every one of us has a role to play.”
Read on to learn more about each winner and their writing processes—and discover all the winning pieces here:
Poetry Winner, Sasindie Subasinghe:
Tell us about your experience writing your winning piece.
When I first approached the climate awards, I had a bunch of ideas bouncing around in my head and not the slightest clue which to focus on. In fact, I didn’t even know whether I wanted to write a poem or a fiction piece! So I decided to let myself explore each idea a little and see how they would grow on the page. It was in this attempt to thin out my initial choices that a brand new idea emerged, to write a poem to the daughter I may never have. I was about to fall asleep when the idea sparked and I knew I had to run to my desk and scribble it out before I lost it to my sleepiness! In a way, most of those initial ideas made it into the final poem too, as a single line or a single image rather than an overarching theme.
What do you hope readers take away from it?
From the very start, the purpose of my poem was to inspire action against climate change. I wanted my poem to hold, side by side, the past, present, and future of our planet: our ancestors, us, and our future children. The past is a done deal, but if we play the cards of the present right, we can protect the future. Our actions today will steer the climate crisis into plight or resolution and every one of us has a role to play. I also want my readers to know that activism is not limited to the loudspeaker and the stage, as we are activists in all the small daily decisions we make: to reuse plastic bags, to organize a beach clean up, or simply to pick up our pen and write a poem for the climate!
Flash Fiction Winner, Jane Long:
Tell us about your experience writing your winning piece.
It was a fun but definitely sobering adventure. I was inspired to write Swamped after learning about the various measures leaders and scientists are considering to prevent climate change. Many of the ideas seem very drastic, even absurd, but I tried to imagine a world where humanity had adapted to living with such things, like the SunShades and Tidewalls. Once I had those in place, the rest of the what-if world kind of fell into place. Some things, like having new time frames such as ShadowsDay and ShadesDown, and devices like the boat crane, felt alien. But others, like heat waves and walking through trash-littered water, are already part of the present. I chose Washington DC for a somewhat ironic reason: the US capital city was originally built in the wetlands of the Potomac River, and with rising sea levels, DC might find itself swamped again. I chose Andromeda’s name for a specific reason too. In Greek mythology, Andromeda is a princess whose extraordinary beauty angers the Greek sea god so much that he floods her homeland and demands she be sacrificed. She finds herself chained to the shoreline, awaiting rescue by the mythical hero Perseus. In my story, humankind is the one chained to those flooded shores, and who knows if there’s a hero in our future?
What do you hope readers take away from it?
A sense of urgency and desire to protect the environment, and a sense of how humanity might adapt to a future with catastrophic climate change.
Advocacy Letter Winner, Luie Waters:
Tell us about your experience writing your winning piece.
I wrote the letter whilst angry and edited it afterwards, so it was a very cathartic experience. It was helpful to me as well, because editing it forced me to actually think through what I was trying to articulate, and understand it myself.
What do you hope readers take away from it?
I hope people take away that the climate crisis isn’t a theory or even a future concern. It is current and worsening and will have catastrophic, permanent consequences. But we can address it. The solutions are there, we just need to reach for them.
Congratulations to the winners!