Nigerian author Abi Daré has been awarded the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize for her second novel, And So I Roar. The £10,000 prize, which recognizes fiction that addresses the climate crisis in fresh and impactful ways, was presented at a ceremony in London.
And So I Roar was published by Sceptre in 2024. It revisits the life of Adunni, the teenage protagonist from Daré’s breakout debut The Girl with the Louding Voice. Adunni is now living in Lagos and eager to begin school, Adunni is unexpectedly called back to the village to participate in a mysterious ancestral ritual. According to publisher notes and early reviews, the novel examines how climate stress sets the stage for everyday violence.
Daré said in a press statement she didn’t initially set out to write a climate novel. “I wanted to explore the lives of rural women and girls navigating inequality, silence and survival,” she explained. “But the deeper I went, the more I saw how environmental collapse bleeds into everything.” She added that, for many in rural Africa, the climate crisis is “more felt than understood”—a reality she sought to render visible through fiction.
Daré was born in Lagos but now lives in Essex. Her debut novel became a New York Times bestseller and a community read across schools and book clubs in multiple countries. In 2023, she launched The Louding Voice Foundation, which provides scholarships to Nigerian girls. Reflecting on her win, she remarked, “As a Black British-Nigerian woman, receiving this prize is a reminder that we do not need to wait for permission to step into global conversations or to contort our stories to fit a certain lens.”
Climate fiction (cli-fi) is an emerging genre in which authors explore themes related to climate change and the environment, sometimes through dystopian futures, other times by challenging how humans understand and relate to the natural world. With And So I Roar, Daré joins a growing movement of African writers tackling ecological issues through literature. Readers interested in other African climate fiction, Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor, Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, and Mbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were are great starting points.
If you’re a writer interested in being considered for the 2025 prize cycle, submissions will open in late summer. Follow the Prize for updates at ClimateFictionPrize.com and on Instagram (@ClimateFictionPrize), X (@Climate_Fiction), LinkedIn (The Climate Fiction Prize), and Bluesky (@climate-fiction.bsky.social).
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