AWW21 The Virus is Here: Pandemics in Fiction - Emily St. John Mandel and Laura Jean McKay

As the Lockdowns of 2020 began, Laura Jean McKay’s story of a world collapsing in the midst of a viral epidemic, The Animals in That Country, seized the popular imagination: a hallucinogenic tale of Zoo Flu with wild symptoms that enable inter-species communication. Emily St. John Mandel’s break-out novel Station Eleven is a gripping, eerie story of civilisation’s collapse in the wake of a flu that wipes out 99% of the world’s population. It sold nearly two million copies worldwide. Both are prescient, terrifying and ultimately hopeful.

Chaired by Sophie Cunningham