Climate Fiction Contest 2018
We’re proud to announce the winners of the 2018 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest!
We received an overwhelming response to this year’s Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest—more than 540 submissions from 66 different countries—and were incredibly impressed by all of the stories. Now, we’re proud to share Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume II, featuring our grand prize winner and nine other finalist stories, along with a foreword by our lead judge, renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The anthology is free to download, read, and share in a variety of digital formats.
Grand Prize Winner—$1000 prize
- Barbara Litkowski, “Monarch Blue,” United States
Finalists—$50 prize
- Sandra K. Barnidge, “The Last Grand Tour of Albertine’s Watch,” United States
- Vajra Chandrasekera, “Half-Eaten Cities,” Sri Lanka
- Anthony Dietz, “Darkness Full of Light,” United States
- David Hudson, “Luna,” Malta
- Rebecca Lawton, “Tuolumne River Days,” United States
- Jean McNeil, “The Most Beautiful Voyage in the World,” United Kingdom
- Leah Newsom, “Orphan Bird,” United States
- Mitch Sullivan, “The Office of Climate Facts,” Australia
- Jean-Louis Trudel, “Losing What We Can’t Live Without,” Canada
About the Contest
In the wake of Earth’s hottest year on record, the effects of climate change are more apparent than ever. But how do we come to grips with the consequences on the ground, for actual people in specific places? If our political responses and our empathy for people besieged by the consequences of climate change fall short, perhaps we need new stories to help us imagine possible futures shaped by climate change and our reactions to it.
In 2016, we hosted our inaugural Climate Fiction Short Story Contest, inviting writers from around the world to submit stories exploring climate change, narrating a world in flux. We were thrilled to receive submissions from 67 different countries, and to publish 12 finalists in a free digital anthology, Everything Change.
For this second edition we broadened the scope, inviting submissions in all genres of short fiction, including speculative, realistic, literary, experimental, hybrid forms, and more. Climate change is so massive and sometimes so ineffable that we need all of the tools of narrative to adequately understand it and share stories and experiences about it.
About the Judging Process
Submissions were subject to multiple rounds of blind review by an editorial board that included ASU experts on sustainability, environmental science, environmental history, science fiction, and creative writing. The final round of judging was conducted by award-winning science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
