Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis has won the National Book Award for Best Anthology at the 40th National Book Awards. Photo: Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities/Agam Agenda.
MANILA, Philippines — A pioneering book on climate change that avoids jargon—including the words “climate change”—won the nod of judges by using stories and images anchored on hope and lunar cycles, written in languages ranging from Tagalog, Kankanaey, English, Cebuano, Chinese, Spanish, Zapoteca, and Turkish.
Titled Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis, the publication won the National Book Award for Best Anthology at the 40th National Book Awards.
“It’s high time we recognize the need to use everything in the toolbox as we confront the limits of science and politics in the response to climate change,” said the writer Red Constantino, managing director of the Constantino Foundation and the former head of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC), which published Harvest Moon.
We need far more poetry and art [at the edge] of the climate crisis… and mountains of resolve and courage.
Renato Redentor Constantino
Constantino is also an editor of the anthology. ICSC won the national book award in 2015 when it published Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change.
Launched in 1982, the awards are given out by the Manila Critics Circle and the National Book Development Board.
“We need far more poetry and art,” said Constantino, “Because at the edge of the climate crisis, it is not spreadsheets and treatises we will find but anguish, indifference, and mountains of resolve and courage.”
Harvest Moon is composed of 30 photographs and 30 poems, stories and essays written in 11 languages from 24 countries spanning Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific.
Over 200 titles were nominated for this year’s book awards. From 100 finalists, 29 were selected as winners, who will receive recognition at a ceremony to be held at the Manila Metropolitan Theater on May 13.
Constantino paid tribute to Padmapani Perez, the poet and anthropologist who is the anthology’s lead editor. “Padma masterfully willed the book into being. Love for literature and a commitment to radically transform society are essential but insufficient. Grit, manic intelligence, delusional confidence when many doubted it could be done—again—these are the ingredients that saw the project through.”
Constantino said Perez enjoyed collaborating closely with the anthology’s other editors, the South African novelist Rehana Rossouw and Colombian poet Alexandra Walter.
Constantino, who is also an editor, said “the three women, trailblazers each individually, were even mightier as a trio. And their work was matched by the brilliance of Fara Manuel-Nolasco who provided the linocut moon prints, and the elegant mind of famed book designer Felix Mago-Miguel. The book’s mesmerizing Afterword is by the dazzling writer Rebecca Solnit.”
Behind-the-scenes in the making of the Harvest Moon anthology of climate poems, photographs, and stories.
Harvest Moon was part of the technical briefs received by over a hundred finance ministers and high officials at the V20 Ministerial Dialogue IX, held at the main hall of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, last October 2022, under the theme When Is Now, the same call of a global poetry rebellion demanding urgent action on the climate crisis.
Constantino recalled the words of the musician Nick Cave, “who reminds us why art is the agent best equipped to bring light to the world. That is its purpose. That is its promise.”
A limited Philippine edition of Harvest Moon remains available at the significantly marked down price of P600, in keeping with ICSC’s vision of an accessible book for readers. Copies are available on Lazada and Shopee.
