Climate fiction finds urgency in Italy's burning summer

As wildfires rage across Europe and Britain swelters through its hottest summer on record, literary fiction has a vital role to play in capturing the severe consequences of the climate crisis, the Guardian argued in an essay published on Sunday. The piece, written by an author who travelled through Europe on a book tour earlier this summer, noted that everywhere she went the heat broke records — including in Italy.

The essay's central claim — that 'it is not only a future certainty – the disaster is already here' — speaks directly to Italy's present reality. The country has spent much of August battling wildfires, enduring drought in the south, and watching its iconic landscapes transformed by extreme weather. For Italian writers and their translators, the climate crisis has moved from speculative backdrop to lived experience.

The Guardian's essay positions climate fiction — sometimes called cli-fi — as a genre that can do what journalism and policy reports cannot: render the slow, diffuse tragedy of environmental collapse in human terms. It argues that novels allow readers to feel the weight of loss and the complexity of collective action in ways that statistics cannot convey.