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Deborah Tomkins: ‘I’m trying to make sense of how we got into this mess’
Awards are like buses, says Deborah Tomkins. After being in the writing game for nearly 20 years, she’s been awarded not just one but two prizes in the last year.
“I’m absolutely delighted and amazed!” she laughs, sharing that after several rejection letters she believed her novella Aerth to be unpublishable until it was chosen as joint-winner of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize by acclaimed author Ali Smith. “It’s a great privilege to have these books chosen.”
Both Aerth – published on January 25 – and her Virginia Prize-winning novel The Wilder Path centre around the climate crisis, albeit in different ways. The former is her first book-length publication, a sci-fi story exploring the concept of a planet going through an ice age.
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“All fiction writing is a case of ‘what if’ – like, what if I went to Greece, met a man and fell in love,” she explains.
“This is, what if our planet was going through an ice age as it really should be in geological time. We should be moving from interglacial towards a glacial period – in the 1970s scientists were convinced that would happen but we’ve skewed the climate too much by burning fossil fuels, with temperatures rising far more rapidly than at any other time in earth’s history.
“So I started thinking, what would it be like to have a society that was functioning and then suddenly having to deal with an ice age. And I’ve worked in lots of big themes – disease, refugees, estrangement, faith.”
The Wilder Path, due to be published in May, is a character-based story of climate and grief, telling the tale of the mother of an environmental activist who dies on a protest mission.
Success has been a long time coming for Tomkins, who has cultivated an interest in the environment that began in childhood.
Growing up in the countryside, “surrounded by people who really understood nature, the seasons, farmed traditionally”, she was aware of the damage caused by a chemical-heavy approach that places pesticide-enhanced productivity and profit above the health of people and wildlife.
It’s something the author feels deeply: “We’ve really done our wildlife a disservice. We’re at the bottom of the international league table in terms of nature and biodiversity. It’s very, very sad,” she says.
Author Ali Smith described Tomkins’ writing as “witty, resonant…work of real energy and narrative grip” and said Aerth is “funny, terrifying, humane…a thrilling journey”
It wasn’t until the mid-2000s, however, that Tomkins realised just how seriously scientists were taking the climate crisis. At this point it dawned on the budding writer that fiction could be an effective way to encourage others to take an interest.
“The way to people’s hearts is through story,” she says. “Most people aren’t interested in facts and figures, they’d much rather hear a story that makes sense of it.
“But I realised there was a massive gap in the market for climate fiction. When I looked round for books I couldn’t find much – so I started writing them.”
Tomkins’ career really took off when she moved to Bristol and found a creative community:
“Bristol was a revelation! I suddenly felt I was home. I didn’t know I had been looking for this kind of place all my life but I wouldn’t want to leave now – I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming.
“There’s a confidence here. I know it’s not all roses – there are lots of social issues of course – but I do think there’s this wonderful creativity and a lovely open attitude in terms of new ideas.”
A decade after starting her first book, Tomkins founded the Bristol Climate Writers group. She found her first members in the “old-fashioned way” by pinning up slips of paper in cafes, and the group has been growing ever since.
A story of climate, grief and environmental awakening, Tomkins’ second novel comes out on 1 May
Discussions around the role of fiction and story in helping people engage with the climate crisis are now common, she says: “Most people are actually just in the here and now, and can only imagine what they’ve experienced or seen already.
“With story, you’re trying to give people an idea of what’s possible, how things could be better than what we have now. Then people might start thinking, maybe we can aim for that.”
She references the Climate Psychology Alliance, an “extraordinary” international network of psychologists that, among other things, offer free sessions to people struggling with climate anxiety.
“They realised that if we go banging on about how bad everything is, people feel so down and depressed that they don’t engage with it. But there’s a whole range of different things you can be doing in a story.
“You need to engage people’s imaginations, emotions, get them really invested in the people you’re talking about, see how the characters can navigate their way through whatever situation you put them in. If it’s well done readers get invested in the character and want them to succeed and do well.”
It’s the approach she’s taken with her two forthcoming novels, and her publisher Aurora Metro views the environmental subject as ‘timely’. “At last these things are getting into the mainstream, where people doing this kind of work were on the margins for so long,” says Tomkins.
“It’s such great news because art really helps people process things. Writing helps me soothe those anxieties around the climate crisis myself. It doesn’t make anything better out there, but it helps to get it out.
“I would encourage everyone to take up some kind of art!”
Deborah Tomkins launches Aerth at Stanfords in Bristol on January 23. The novella is available to preorder. The Wilder Path is also available to preorder and will be published by Aurora Metro on May 1 2025.
Main image: Deb Tomkins
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