Event information
A three-hour writing workshop invites participants to move past familiar dystopian storytelling and toward fiction that imagines liveable, ecologically grounded futures. The session is run by Climate Lounge facilitators Dela Gwala and Sarah Robyn Farrell.
The workshop draws on the visionary fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Solarpunk movement, and the Pan-African speculative anthology Our Move Next, which reimagines post-capitalist futures from an African perspective. Rather than treating dystopia as fiction's default mode for engaging with crisis, the session frames speculative writing as a tool for design and imagination as much as warning.
Participants can expect a mix of craft discussion, close reading of selected texts and generative writing exercises structured to build an expanded sense of what the genre can hold. The format is participatory rather than a straight panel discussion, and is suited to writers at any stage who want hands-on practice rather than a purely theoretical session.
The workshop runs for the full afternoon in the HCC Boardroom, a smaller, more contained space than the festival's main theatres.