Hum by Helen Phillips wins 2026 Climate Fiction Prize

Helen Phillips was crowned the 2026 winner of the Climate Fiction Prize for her novel, Hum last night at the award ceremony in London, taking home the £10,000 prize.

Helen Phillip’s perceptive and compassionate novel Hum is set in an all too plausible near future impacted by climate change and dizzying technological advancement. Perspectives on love and family bonds—between partners, parents and children, and siblings—are central to the story, exploring how relationships respond to the anxieties of a fast-changing world. There is comfort woven between the crisp prose, which pays homage to our desire to adopt new technology whilst protecting our power to choose and resist.
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The protagonist, May, loses her job to artificial intelligence and, desperate to resolve her family’s debt, becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognised by surveillance. May splurges a significant portion of these hard won funds to gain access to one of the last remaining green spaces. In doing so, she powerfully depicts humans’ intrinsic yearning for nature and clean air, as not just desirable, but crucial, amidst its commodification and pollution. Phillips avoids sanctimony and presents potential outcomes, both utopian and dystopian, with warmth, humanity and Black Mirror-esque dark humour.

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including The Need, a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.
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Lucy Stone, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Spring said:
“As rapid tech and AI advancements coincide with accelerating climate impacts, it is easy to feel like Big Tech’s vision of the future is inevitable. But the future is not written. Storytelling has the power to challenge and change these narratives, by connecting big ideas of AI and climate to relatable human experiences, and illuminating futures where tech is in service of the biosphere and humanity. Hum is a powerful story that explores alternative visions and helps us connect with what really matters.”

Congratulations to Helen Phillips! Learn more about the Prize here.