Interview with the Author: Kenechi Udogu

Kenechi Udogu and I meet for a walk through one of her favourite places in London, Regent’s Park. It’s August, and the flowerbeds are still in bloom as we wander along the cultivated paths.

Kenechi has loved watching plants bloom her entire life. Growing up in Enugu, Nigeria, she would watch the dark pink blossoms of the plantain trees open as they burst into yellowing fruit.

After two decades spent 5000km north, in the UK, Kenechi had nurtured this love for nature, an affinity inherited from her mother. “I have quite a lot of plants at home, and I sing to them,” says Kenechi. “I don’t believe it has to be any classical music. I sing rock music to them - it’s fine.” She smiles. “I genuinely believe it helps.”

That is why, in her short story, Plantains in Heaven, she explores the tragic future of a flooded London where Kew Gardens, home to the world’s most diverse living plant collection, is underwater. Selected as a finalist for the 2025 Imagine 2200 Grist climate fiction competition, Plantains in Heaven explores themes of hope and resilience through its two teenage main characters, Adriana and Emeka.

“If you write sci-fi, you need to think about real things as opposed to fantasy, right?” she says. “I was thinking about the fact that all this could go if we did have this flood.” A realisation that came to her during walks alongside the River Thames, “No one ever thinks about the fact that there's something stopping water from flooding when we have all these extra-long spells of rain.”

In Plantains in Heaven, communities reckon with the aftermath of ‘The Break’ – when millions of litres of floodwater thundered through a failed Thames barrier, surging into homes and submerging streets permanently.

In the story, protagonist Emeka helps his friend Adriana grow plantains in a warmer London to fulfil the dreams of her ailing grandmother. Growing this previously abundant staple is nearly impossible, and Adriana must secretly germinate her precious crop in an abandoned ballroom.

Plantains are woven throughout the story, uniting Emeka's Nigerian heritage with Adriana’s abuela’s Puerto Rican one. “Lots of African cultures eat plantain. But also, I only discovered this when I came to England, that lots of other countries, like South Asian and South American countries, eat plantain.”

And it is staple crops like plantains that will be affected by climate collapse – a familiar food, taken for granted, until it’s too late. “When things that you take for granted are no longer there, then you start to realise, ‘Oh okay, there’s a problem,’” Kenechi says. “It's when you experience the really hot summers and really cold winters that you actually start thinking about it.” However, for Adriana and Emeka, the plantains offer the hope of newfound resilience amidst dystopia. Even destroyed spaces can be reclaimed, alive with fresh blooms.

For Kenechi, the pandemic helped her appreciate the importance of green spaces and access to nature.  “Everything just felt horrible, and everyone was isolated,” she says, reminiscing about the regular long walks she began to take. “I would mark my routes through parks, going through back roads. And I was discovering a lot of spaces I had never seen before, even though I had lived in these areas for a long time.”

Until then, she had also squeezed in time to write alongside a full-time job as an architect – working through evenings and weekends. “Writing has always been a part of my existence,” she says. “I used to write comic books in primary school and give them to my friends. Some of them still have them.”

In 2020, however, she switched to part-time work so she could chase her literary dream, writing climate fiction and other sci-fi stories. She had always been drawn to fantasy and fiction, a love for genres that stemmed from her vibrant heritage. “I'll tell you the truth. Nigerian folklore is all about magic.”

Her walks also inspired a ‘52 Shades of Green’ social media challenge, where she visited and shared a new, underappreciated green space in London every week.

As we walk through the park together, we inhale the smells of summer. Unlike Emeka and Adriana, we can walk across London and breathe air unsullied by ‘toxic carbon dust’ and the need for respirators.  Despite inheriting such a troubled world, Adriana and Emeka dare to love deeply, take risks and try to build a better world, even if it’s just a tiny plant pot. Life goes on over submerged streets.

“The problem with dystopias is that they tend to be bleak. Everybody's fighting in this world, and everything tends to be downhill,” Kenechi says. “I want to believe that whatever happens, we would still be able to survive a bleak future.”As a w

riter, Kenechi tries to balance the possibilities of a world ravaged by climate change, alongside solutions. “What scares me is that one day it will be real for everybody,” she says. “But then it's too late when it's everybody's problem. Because it's not like the pandemic, where you can solve the problem by creating a vaccine.”

“When it reaches that level where the world is too hot or too cold, or rivers dry out, then we can't go back from it.”

She adds, “For me, it's scary, but I keep saying I want to believe that we can be afraid, but we can still be proactive.”

Kenechi’s voice carries far beyond her faithful plant audience and readers. As part of the London City Voices choir, she sang ‘Dido’s Lament’ for the 2020 Greenpeace collaboration with Annie Lennox to raise awareness about the climate crisis. Also, her work for the Royal Institute of British Architects engages with sustainability regulations for buildings and construction.

And for Kenechi, being proactive also means continuing to bring her stories to life. Like Adriana and Emeka, to nurture hope against all odds, and emerge – hand-in-hand with nature – resilient and thriving.