Catherine is a passionate advocate for fantasy books, which have the more-than-magical power to help us see the natural world freshly and imagine how we could live in it better. She spent four years of her life researching that power, which included reading this whole bookshelf, then writing her own book-sized PhD thesis – it’s called Ecoconscious: Skilful Sensing in Young Adult Fantasy Literature.

We can’t write novels (and definitely not fantasy worlds) without descriptions of smells, tastes, sounds, sights, textures and movements to make our writing vivid, but the environmental messages insinuated by sensory descriptions had never been studied… so Ecoconscious identifies and discusses common sensory motifs. These motifs need talking about so that authors avoid accidentally reinforcing human superiority complexes and fears of nature through their descriptions, and instead write characters who are proud of their embodied participation in nature and learn to sense animals, plants and their surroundings skilfully.

As a reviewer for ClimateLit, Catherine recommends some of these excellent fantasy books for teens and children which reimagine environmental problems and solutions.

Catherine hopes to share her own fantasy world with you, one day soon.