Hannah Klaubert – Narrating Nuclear Disaster

Literature scholar Hannah Klaubert discussed her book Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form after Chornobyl and Fukushima (Bloomsbury, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with host Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 28 September 2026.

In a field that remains scientifically contested and, in the current moment of climate breakdown, highly politicized, Narrating Nuclear Disasters offers literature as an arena for exploring the uncertainty arising from events whose short- and long-term effects remain hard to oversee. By reading a wide corpus of post-Chornobyl and post-Fukushima literature from canonical texts by Christa Wolf, Julian Barnes and Ruth Ozeki to genre fiction such as thrillers and travelogues, the book offers a new way of thinking about nuclear narratives and nuclear culture more broadly. In doing so, it positions nuclear disaster narratives within a wider context of “Anthropocene literature”, forging new connections between nuclear culture and contemporary ecocriticism.