Madeleine Watts: 'Climate change should be in everyone's writing right now'

In her second novel Elegy, Southwest, the Australian author writes into the climate crisis from a millennial perspective with a mixed sense of melancholy and hopeGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailThere is a hole in the heart of Madeleine Watts' melancholic second novel Elegy, Southwest. "A really big, and expensive, hole," says Lewis, one half of the married couple whose desert road trip forms the novel's narrative arc. The hole, a land artwork in progress, is titled "Negative Capability" after "a quality that Keats believed the best artists possessed: the ability to stay open to doubt and uncertainty". It's a quality Watts has in spades."My general personality is to go up close to the thing that makes me sad or frightened. I go up close and tinker around and it feels like I gain a modicum of control. It doesn't necessarily feel cathartic but I've done something," the Australian author says. Continue reading...