Tara K. Menon’s debut novel Under Water (Riverhead, 2026), split between the eve of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the eve of Hurricane Sandy in New York, offers a riposte to the genre known as “cli-fi” (i.e. dystopian, apocalyptic, futuristic fiction). First, the novel presents climate change not as a future certainty but instead as a past and present truth. Second, and perhaps counter-intuitively given two spectacular events at its center, in its focus on coral reefs and manta rays in the Andaman Sea, the novel presents irreversible, ruinous human-induced changes as mundane and quotidian. Although a scholar of nineteenth-century British novels, Menon will theorize her working practice as a novelist.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tara K. Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University and a PhD in English from New York University. From 2019 to 2023, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Her debut novel, Under Water, is forthcoming with Summit in the UK and Riverhead in the US in March. Rights have also been sold in 31 other languages. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Sewanee Review, The Point, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and Public Books, where she co-edits the Literary Fiction section.
Her first academic monograph Speaking Parts: Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2026. Her academic work has appeared in Narrative, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and Studies in the Novel.
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📍Venue: AS8 04-04, National University of Singapore (take the elevator next to the ground-floor Coffee Roaster to the 4th floor)
🏢 Address: 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260
🗓️ Date: Wednesday, 14 Jan 2026
🕛 Time: 4.00 pm - 5.00 pm
🎟️ Registration: Here.
ℹ️ Info: Questions about the event can be addressed to ellhlb@nus.edu.sg and elley@nus.edu.sg