Madeleine Thien and Robbie Arnott are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s £10,000 Climate fiction prize.

Now in its second year, the prize celebrates novels that engage with the climate crisis through imaginative storytelling. This year’s shortlist spans a wide range of styles, from speculative fiction to reimagined myth.

Thien’s The Book of Records follows a girl who escapes with her father from flooding in a near-future China, and arrives at a large migrant compound called the Sea. The book traces the human costs of the climate crisis and social injustice, weaving personal and historical journeys across generations in what Guardian reviewer Xan Brooks called a “rich and beautiful novel”.

Robbie Arnott was shortlisted for Dusk, about twins who join the hunt for a puma in the Tasmanian wilderness, described in a Guardian review by James Bradley as a “starkly beautiful and deeply felt” novel.

Also in contention for the award is The Tiger’s Share, the second novel by Indian author Keshava Guha, a state-of-the-nation tale of sibling rivalry set in heavily polluted Delhi.

Susanna Kwan was shortlisted for Awake in the Floating City. This debut is about an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for, two of the last remaining people in a flooded San Francisco of the future.

Other novels on the list address the intersection of climate change with competing global crises. Endling, by Maria Reva, considers environmental collapse alongside Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The novel was praised in the Guardian as “dexterous and formally inventive”, and was also longlisted for the Booker prize.

Elsewhere, Helen Phillips’s sixth book, Hum, is set in a near future where robots called “hums” have taken over many jobs, the air is poisonous and the tap water is contaminated. It was described by Daisy Hildyard in the Guardian as “mesmerising and scary”.

The judging panel for this year’s prize features Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic at the Guardian, novelists Kit de Waal and Jessie Greengrass, climate scientist Friederike Otto, and broadcaster Simon Savidge.

Titles longlisted for the prize that did not make the shortlist were Every Version of You by Grace Chan, Helm by Sarah Hall, Albion by Anna Hope, The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran, Juice by Tim Winton, and Sunbirth by An Yu.

The award is funded by Climate Spring, which also finances and consults on climate-related film and TV projects.

The shortlisted novels range “from intimate family stories to sweeping political and historical narratives”, said Lucy Stone, founder and executive director of Climate Spring. “These novels fluidly move across genres and settings while grappling with some of the defining themes of our time – power, accountability, community and resilience in a changing world.”

The prize was launched in June 2024 at Hay literary festival, and the inaugural winner was Abi Daré’s And So I Roar.

In order to be eligible for this year’s prize, books must have been published in the UK between 1 September 2024 and 31 August 2025. The winner will be announced on 27 May.

Margot Robbie has come out in defence of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which she is playing Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Despite being months away from release, the film has attracted criticism for its casting as well as alterations that Fennell has made to the characters. In an interview with Vogue magazine, Robbie said: “I get it … there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie.”

Much of the controversy has stemmed from the casting of Elordi as a character described by Brontë as “dark-skinned” and a “lascar” (a colonial term for a South Asian sailor or soldier). In Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of the novel, James Howson became the first black actor to play the role. Robbie said of Elordi: “I saw him play Heathcliff, and he is Heathcliff. I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy.”

She added: “It’s a character that has this lineage of other great actors who’ve played him, from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton and Ralph Fiennes to Tom Hardy. To be a part of that is special. He’s incredible and I believe in him so much. I honestly think he’s our generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis.”

There has also been some disquiet over Robbie’s casting. In the novel, Cathy is described as dark-haired and is in her late teens; Robbie is in her mid-30s and the early trailer releases show her with blond hair. The film’s casting director Kharmel Cochrane said earlier this year: “There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot. But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

In the same Vogue interview Robbie outlined her interest in the character: “I both understood her and didn’t, in a way that drew me to her. It’s this puzzle you have to work out.”

Fennell also defended her decision to cast Robbie in the role, saying: “Cathy is a star. She’s wilful, mean, a recreational sadist, a provocateur. She engages in cruelty in a way that is disturbing and fascinating. It was about finding someone who you would forgive in spite of yourself, someone who literally everyone in the world would understand why you love her.”

She added: “It’s difficult to find that supersized star power. Margot comes with big dick energy. That’s what Cathy needs.”

Fennell has built her directing career on constructing outrageous, social media-friendly narratives with strongly provocative elements. While making her mark as an actor, notably as Camilla Shand in the TV series The Crown, Fennell moved into writing and showrunning on the TV series Killing Eve before making her film directing debut with Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, for which Fennell won the best original screenplay Oscar. She followed this up with Saltburn, which attained notoriety for scenes in which Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver drinks bathwater containing semen and dances naked through the stately home of the title.

Fennell appears to be employing similarly audience-baiting tactics in Wuthering Heights, with reports emerging from an early test screening in August that the film was “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”, and includes a scene of a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”.

Robbie, who recently starred in and produced the blockbuster Barbie adaptation, also acts as a producer on Wuthering Heights, having been a producer on both of Fennell’s previous feature films. Robbie’s production company LuckyChap, which includes her husband, Tom Ackerley, among its principals, has emerged as an entertainment industry force, with production credits on I, Tonya, Birds of Prey and My Old Ass alongside Barbie and Fennell’s films.

At the Brontë Women’s Writing festival last year, Fennell defended her approach to Wuthering Heights, saying that Brontë’s novel, originally published in 1847, meant a huge amount to her: “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book. I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private.”

She added: “[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”

Of the film’s erotic content, Robbie told Vogue: “Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative – it definitely is provocative – but it’s more romantic than provocative. This is a big epic romance.”

She and Fennell discussed this on the set: “What reads to us as hot or exciting or sexy? And it’s not just a sex position or someone taking their shirt off.” A scene in which Elordi’s Heathcliff shelters Cathy from the rain “almost made me weak at the knees”, Robbie said, adding: “It was the little things that we loved as two women in our 30s, and this movie is primarily for people in our demographic. These epic romances and period pieces aren’t often made by women.”

Robbie said that Fennell’s ambition was to make “this generation’s Titanic” and Fennell told her: “I went to the cinema to watch Romeo & Juliet eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn’t allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that.”