In Lagos, the rains don’t just arrive; they declare themselves. Sheets of water pour from the sky drumming on rooftops, spilling into streets, folding traffic into a slow-moving blur. For many Nigerians, the season carries both nostalgia and dread: childhood memories of dancing barefoot in puddles, and the adult knowledge that those same floods now swallow homes, erase livelihoods, and expose fragile infrastructure. In 2022, more than 1.4 million people were displaced across 34 of Nigeria’s 36 states by one of the worst flood seasons on record, a stark reminder of how climate change is no longer a distant threat but a lived reality, one that collides with poor planning and inequality to deepen existing fractures.
It is within a lived landscape marked by environmental fragility that Abi Daré’s novel, And So I Roar, unfolds, a story that begins in the intimate but expands into the political, asking what survival, hope, and solidarity might look like when the ground itself seems to shift beneath one’s feet. The novel is not typical “climate fiction;” there are no melting glaciers or dystopian deserts. Rather, it is a portrait of how environmental crises manifest in everyday lives: dwindling farmlands, forced migrations, girls pulled out of school, families negotiating impossible choices.
Daré has always written about young women who insist on being heard. Her first novel, The Girl with the Louding Voice, introduced readers to Adunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl sold into marriage who fights for her education, her dignity, and her “louding voice.” The novel became an international breakout success, earning New York Times bestseller status and a shortlist nomination for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It established Daré as a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction and set the stage for her next novel, And So I Roar. In And So I Roar, Daré returns to Adunni’s story but with even greater urgency. Daré builds a world where the personal is inseparable from the political, as Adunni is falsely accused of causing the death of her husband’s second wife, and confronts new forms of silencing.
For decades, climate storytelling has been dominated by Western anxieties—the end of ice, the loss of comfort, the fear of scarcity. But for writers like Daré, climate change is not speculative. It is the weathered face of a farmer who can no longer read the seasons, the girl whose education ends when her father’s crops fail, the mother who must rebuild after another flood. These are not apocalyptic futures; they are the layered present. Daré’s power lies in her refusal to separate climate from human conditions such as poverty, patriarchy, and displacement, demonstrating that the most urgent ecological stories are often told through the smallest and most intimate acts of survival.
The novel’s recognition by the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in early 2025 is not just a literary milestone; it signals a subtle shift in who gets to imagine the planet’s future. In her acceptance speech, Daré said she initially set out to tell a human story “about a girl fighting for an education, her educated older friend with secrets of her own, and the rural women navigating inequality in Nigeria,” but soon realized that “the environment was impossible to ignore.” She described how “climate injustice is felt more than understood” across rural Africa, where a failed farm might mean a forced marriage or a family displaced from ancestral land. “This prize matters because fiction lets us bear witness and makes the abstract real,” she added. “It gets under your skin and moves the heart in a way data alone cannot.”
In And So I Roar, imagination itself becomes an act of resistance. That belief that storytelling can be a rehearsal for new futures places Daré firmly within a lineage of writers who use fiction not just as escape but as visioning: to chart the contours of worlds that could be.
Kehinde Grace Adepetun (KGA): Your novels often begin in the intimate but they open into vast social questions. In And So I Roar, were you consciously imagining political futures for the Global South, or did that vision emerge naturally from your characters’ journeys?
Abi Daré (AD): It always begins with the characters for me. I never set out to write a political novel, but as the characters begin to speak and live and struggle on the page, the world they inhabit starts to take shape. In that world, politics is inescapable and individual choices are often tied tightly to systemic forces like corruption, inequality, climate pressure, and patriarchy. So while I didn’t sit down thinking, “Let me imagine a political future,” I did want to stay honest, which in this context meant exploring how politics shapes the everyday lives of people who don’t always have the privilege of ignoring it.
KGA: Your fiction on climate change is rooted in the lived realities of Nigeria: displacement, survival, womanhood. What kinds of truths can fiction from Nigeria or Africa reveal that global climate conversations often overlook?
AD: Climate change is here and for many communities, the effects of the crisis show up in harsh ways, through food insecurity, water scarcity, migration, the collapse of livelihoods, or forced marriage (for survival) because the family farm failed. What fiction does so well is give the statistics a heartbeat, a pulse. It reveals the injustices people face and how climate pressure compounds things like poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to healthcare. It also shows the ingenuity and resilience of those who are too often seen only as victims.
KGA: In your stories, the climate crisis isn’t separate from poverty or patriarchy, it’s part of the same web. For example, Adunni returns to her rural village where there is drought and the crops are failing, and, because of superstitions, these problems are blamed on some girls. How do you see women’s survival strategies reshaping what “climate resilience” means, especially in African and diasporic contexts?
AD: I think African women have always been resilient, and this resilience shows up in the ways women adapt, organize, protect their communities, and pass down knowledge even when systems fail them. In that sense, climate resilience is about care work and intuition and holding things together with whatever is at hand. Women are reimagining what survival looks like.
KGA: When you think about solidarity across the Global South, what does it look like?
AD: Shared language. The sense of shared experience of extraction, erasure, imposed systems, and resistance. It looks like creating platforms where we can see one another clearly, not filtered through Western narratives. It also looks like amplifying each other’s work. Reading each other’s books. Listening, translating, publishing across borders. We are not monoliths, but we are deeply connected. Solidarity means moving from shared pain to shared imagination.
Solidarity means moving from shared pain to shared imagination.
KGA: Many readers call your work “hopeful realism.” How do you balance tenderness and anger when writing about devastation?
AD: I let the characters lead and their tenderness comes from being human. I don’t believe in writing stories that leave people hopeless. I also don’t believe in sugarcoating devastation. So I try to hold both truths in the same hand. There is grief, and there is humor and joy in equal measure. There is loss, resistance, and hope.
KGA: What role does imagination play in how communities respond to crises, especially those long denied the luxury of hope?
AD: Imagination becomes a form of defiance. When reality is difficult, imagination allows people to dream sideways, to find cracks in the wall to let light filter in. For communities long denied the gift and luxury of hope, imagination is often the first step towards liberation because it allows people to reframe what is possible. Fiction provides a safe space to practice those possibilities, to rehearse new futures before they exist.
When reality is difficult, imagination allows people to dream sideways, to find cracks in the wall to let light filter in.
KGA: Writers from the Global South are often asked to bear witness to suffering rather than imagine new worlds. Do you see your fiction as a form of political thought, a kind of visioning?
AD: Imagination can be deeply political and choosing what to center, question, grieve and/or celebrate are all political acts. But I resist the idea that writing about suffering and imagining new worlds are separate things. Often they happen together. Sometimes the most radical vision is found in a story that insists on joy, community and survival. I don’t want to write trauma for spectacle. I want to write stories that allow my readers to walk in the shoes of my characters.
I resist the idea that writing about suffering and imagining new worlds are separate things. Often they happen together.
KGA: You recently wrapped up a reading tour in Nigeria—a kind of homecoming. What conversations there stayed with you? Did hearing directly from Nigerian readers change the way you think about solidarity or storytelling?
AD: The Lagos tour was phenomenal in every sense. It felt wonderful to be back home, where my heart truly lives. The tour reminded me that once stories are out in the world, they begin to live in other people. Nigerian readers showed me how deeply they appreciated my stories, and this appreciation manifested itself through brilliant sparks of conversation, laughter, and healing. There was also the stage adaptation of The Girl with the Louding Voice in Lagos, performed by children, for children. That moment was unforgettable. Some of the scenes were drawn directly from the book, and it was wonderful to see it come alive at home, on familiar soil, to feel the joy of the audience as they recognized their world on stage.
KGA: And So I Roar recently received the Climate Fiction Prize, which recognizes narratives expanding how we think about our planetary future. What does this recognition mean to you, and what space do you hope it opens for African writers and storytellers?
AD: A great deal. Awards come and go, but this one felt particularly meaningful because it recognized something I care deeply about, which is how fiction can reshape how we think about the future, especially from under-represented perspectives. I hope it encourages more African writers to tell climate stories on their own terms. Stories about care, about resistance, place, memory and inheritance. We need more narratives that challenge and expand the dominant Western lens.
KGA: Now that you have gotten more international recognition for your work, do you feel a different sense of responsibility to your readers, to your homeland, or to the stories themselves?
AD: I feel responsible for the truth of the stories, first and foremost. Stories must be honest and unflattened. I also feel accountable to Nigerian readers, especially young women like Adunni [the novel’s main character] who write to say they see themselves on the page. That means everything. Success does not insulate you from responsibility; rather, it compels you to hold the door open a little wider and to be a lot more willing to write the stories that can make a positive difference.