Writers of the Anthropocene: 'Genres of Emergency with Daisy Hildyard

Part of UCL Anthropocene's Writers of the Anthropocene series, in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Hybrid - In Person and Online (Zoom)

A popular way of imagining climate change is the apocalyptic event that floods, burns, sweeps away our cities and wrecks the ordinary ways of living we are so strongly attached to. In her latest novel Emergency (2022), Daisy Hildyard rethinks what an emergency is through stories about dissolving boundaries in rural Yorkshire, while also reinventing the pastoral novel for the era of the Anthropocene. In this event, the award-winning author will read from and talk about her work in conversation with Hans Demeyer.

Daisy Hildyard is author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). Her most recent book, Emergency, tells stories of the global connections, and the human-nonhuman relationships, within a small rural area of the north of England. Her writing has received awards including a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium (National Book Awards, USA) and a Somerset Maugham Award (Society of Authors, UK). She contributes to publications including The Guardian, Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, frieze, and art-agenda. She lives in North Yorkshire.

Hans Demeyer is a Lecturer in Dutch & Comparative Literature at University College London. He recently published, together with Sven Vitse, Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millenialgeneratie (2021; Amsterdam University Press) [Affective Crisis, Literary Repair: The Novels of the Millennials], a study of twenty-first-century literature from the perspective of an affective crisis.