Author Archives: Briohny Doyle

Briohny Doyle is the author of the Cli-Fi novel The Island Will Sink, and the nonfiction book Adult Fantasy. She is a Lecturer in Creative Practice (writing and literature) at Deakin University.
book cover for The Island Will Sink by Briohny Doyle. The review on the front cover reads "A dystopian romp, deep with ideas and heart." The cover depicts a stormy, dark blue sea with grayish white clouds above.

Dramatising the Future

This is the third in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of the larger Anthropocene Curriculum project. Over the four days of the Campus, 110 participants from 49 universities (plus several art institutions and museums) attended keynotes, art exhibits, fieldtrips, and workshops based around the theme of ‘the elemental’. Earlier this year, at the Emerging Writers Festival panel on ‘Writing the Anthropocene’, I was asked if I thought that, in imagining a future world for my 2016 novel The Island Will Sink, I also had an ethical responsibility to ‘get it right’. The question was asked by a writer who also worked as a sustainability officer in community organisations. It led to more uncomfortable questions: As a writer of fiction, is it a problem to use the predicted extinctions and environmental catastrophes of the not too distant future to produce (amongst other things) stakes in a literary production? (read more...)