Wheeler Centre joins international climate change project

Monday, 17 February 2014 Books+Publishing

The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne is one of five international partners in a new literature and climate change project called Weather Stations.

Organisations in Berlin (internationals literaturfestival), Dublin (Tallaght Community Arts), London (Free Word) and Warsaw (Krytyka Polityczna) will also take part in the 18-month long project, which aims to ‘explore how literature can inspire new ways of living in the context of the most fundamental challenge facing humanity today—climate change’.

Each partner has appointed a writer-in-residence to ‘investigate, discover, learn and debate the key issues about our relationship with the environment’. Tony Birch has been appointed as the Melbourne writer-in-residence. The other writers selected for the project are: Xiaolu Guo in London; Mirko Bonné in Berlin; Jas Kapela in Warsaw; and Oisín McGann in Dublin.

Each of the selected writers will publish their work, including their ‘discoveries, delights and frustrations’, on the Weather Stations website, which will be launched in coming months. The international writers will also visit Australia in coming months to meet each other and ‘experience the effects of climate change first hand’.

The Weather Stations project will also establish a ‘substation’ at a local school to work with teachers and students. The organisers said in a statement that the outcome of the project ‘will be a body of literature with a new language and a narrative to express how we might move from a doomed economy of industrial growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of the world’.

‘The Wheeler Centre is dedicated to providing a space for important conversations, big ideas and the telling of shared stories, and there are few conversations more fraught, ideas more crucial or stories less well told than those around climate change and its impact on our planet,’ Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams said in the statement. ‘A truly international problem calls for an imaginative and ambitious response, and the Weather Stations project is such a response. Across 2014-15, we’ll connect our Australian writer-in-residence with the best of Australian climate scientists, the education sector and four formidable European peers, and invite them to apply their storytelling skills to what they learn. In Tony Birch, we have a storyteller and representative who will do justice to these big plans.’

For more information about each of the Weather Stations partners, visit the website here.

Category: Local news