Sep 03 2026 to Sep 03 2026 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Climate change is already here, woven into the mundane and the everyday. This conversation on the novel Under Water explores what literary fiction can capture about the natural world that dystopian “cli-fi” often cannot. It touches on the limits and possibilities of fiction when it comes to representing the environment, climate change, and grief.

The novel moves between two large-scale disasters, but it lingers longest on something smaller: the slow, gradual, often invisible changes to local ecosystems, what critic Rob Nixon called “slow violence.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argued that serious literary fiction has largely failed to represent climate change at all, leaving the subject to genre and spectacle. Under Water is offered as an answer to that gap, fiction that holds both the freak event and the quiet, cumulative truth of a changing world.

In collaboration with:

Venue: Seminar Halls
Speakers

Tara Menon
Associate Professor of English, Harvard University
Tara K Menon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University and a PhD in English from New York University. Born in India, she grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and now works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, Under Water, published by Simon and Schuster and Riverhead earlier this year, has been, or will be, translated into 34 languages. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The Guardian.

Keshava Guha
Writer
Keshava Guha was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. He studied history and politics at Harvard, and writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes regularly on politics, literature and sport for a host of publications.