Britain is a country semi-paralysed by its political systems and hierarchy: monarchy, landowners, elite schools, big business, offshore business, class.

When she pops up on my computer screen one Sunday afternoon to talk about Helm, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsmiths prize, Hall is zingy from a wild swim in a local lake, her distinctive pixie haircut un-mussable by the elements. She describes this exhilarating latest novel as “a strange biography” of Britain’s only named wind. I’m embarrassed to confess I’d never heard of the Helm before – a gust that hurtles down the south-west slope of the Cross Fell escarpment, before bouncing back up into the air like the “standing wave” seen below some waterfalls – but Hall tells me not to worry. “A lot of people in Cumbria haven’t heard of it either,” she says. While many around the world are familiar with the character of France’s fierce Mistral wind and the Sahara’s dusty Sirocco, Cumbria’s naughty Helm remains “a local deity, not a secret exactly, but…”.

She began Helm-watching as a child from the window of her parents’ cottage (where she now lives with her daughter), studying the landscape that has become a character in much of her work. She believes there’s “maybe more of an awareness of deep time in a place like this, with its prehistoric carvings and fossils” as well as its wind, that “made the bus late and kids miss school”.

She first pitched the idea of a book about the Helm to her publisher in 2003, but couldn’t find a literary form to harness the elusive, “electric” thrill of the wind. “I would consider myself a fairly conventional novel writer,” she says, but the Helm wouldn’t behave in a conventional structure. “So I had to let go of traditional ideas of controlling the subject and let it be freeform.” She grins as she describes the writing “becoming like a crazy circus act” as she threw in mathematical equations, a woodcut and one of her daughter’s pictures of a wind demon with a hole for a heart. “I don’t think we’re living in an era when novels have to be NOVELS anymore,” she tells me. “So, it’s quite exciting hybrid territory out there. This thing could be comprised of all sorts of formal and informal exercises.”

The book tells the story of the wind across time and space and gives the Helm its own puckish voice, which is quite narcissistic and continually seeking a reaction from the people that mill about beneath it. “Fear, devotion, inquisition, obsession, admiration”, it wants to suck them all up into its vortex. Hall has fun lobbing human stories into the wind’s energy, like frisbees; some stay spinning throughout the novel, others breeze past in fleeting sketches. As the only author to win the BBC’s National Short Story Award twice, she’s adept at conjuring lingering lozenges of narrative and has a hoot with a brief skit about a couple of aristocrats getting frisky in the “death trap” of a hot air balloon. Champagne glasses are tossed overboard in breathless abandon while the Helm tugs at the stitching holding the silk carapace together, making for a thrilling threesome.

Other story strands take us into more serious territory. As a committed humanist, Hall is compassionate in her portrayal of characters attempting to fit the wind’s force into their religious belief systems. We meet a medieval crusader, “a wally” of a Victorian meteorologist, a schizophrenic child in the mid-twentieth century and a modern climate scientist measuring air-borne pollution levels. There’s also a Neolithic woman who gains social status from her rare ability to stare deeply into the heart of the Helm. She sees something “blue-grey, like bull-hide, with the dull pearl-shine of scales at its edges. It was faceless and its body was its only government.”

At its core this is a book that faces the awful possibility of a wind’s death amid climate collapse. The Helm is left feeling “under the weather” as it fills up with man-made fumes and litter. It’s choked by balloons and tortured by military jets, which it describes as “appalling fuckers!”.

“Thinking about the end time, [about] weather systems breaking down,” is what helped Hall to think of the Helm in terms of a life-spanning biography running from birth to death. “We don’t know how volatile the weather systems are going to get,” she says. Will the Helm expire in our lifetime, I ask her. “Possibly not. Or possibly,” she shrugs. “Trying to predict what might happen in a runaway climate scenario is horrifying.” She points out that the neolithic strand of her narrative, a battle for survival, foreshadows our own future. It is one in which “we might struggle to survive again,” if the atmosphere becomes “so big and difficult… If nature runs haywire.”

The next trick for women is sorority, from the local to the global. It’s the way to consolidate power shifts and effect positive change

It’s a bleak outlook, yet Helm is a novel that faces the possibility of climate collapse with a certain palms-up jauntiness. It’s fun, not all doom and gloom. Hall explains that over the past decade she’d often worry about “what happens when we internalise these narratives of capitalism and hopelessness and think: this is the only model, the only way money works.” But she’s changed. “How damaging that is!” Now the author is all about “living differently, refusing paternalism and patriarchy,” telling me: “We absolutely do have to change the stories. Without stories and visions people don’t believe there is another way.”

Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat (2021) was written under difficult personal circumstances. “My mother had died, my father was terminally ill,” she explains. “Then I went through the pandemic as a single mother in Sarah Connor [the Terminator’s warrior-heroine] mode. After that I wanted to recover an imaginative, playful way of writing. I wanted it to be a joy.” So in Helm there are also fart jokes.

I ask whether the recovery of some wildlife during the pandemic lockdown gave Hall cause for optimism. She shakes her head, pointing out that, “not everyone had access to nature and that imbalance was exposed. There was no big systems change. I think the levels of damage to rivers continued, issues with agriculture continued…”. Her partner works for River Action and she rails against water companies that seem happier to pay fines than stop polluting the arteries of our country.

“Things can change fast but it takes deep-root political agitation – something increasingly illegal – and ideas such as those put forward by George Monbiot to really shake the tree,” she says. “Britain is a country semi-paralysed by its political systems and hierarchy: monarchy, land owners, elite schools, big business, offshore business, class. That has to change. There has to be a fundamental shift in nature rights and our social and financial structures.”

While many of us invest in simple environmental measures to bring more sparrows and butterflies into our gardens, Hall’s racing mind exacts what she calls “a very radical form of optimism” to bring about change. “Genuine long-term rewilding work seems to require large landowners to take the initiative,” she notes. While the novelist’s home valley is benefiting from a project by Rewilding Britain, she’s bewildered that the government has blocked proposals for swift bricks (providing nesting cavities) to be installed nationwide in all new homes. “What the fuck, Labour?! The politics still seem lacking.”

Having lived in the American South for a “fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable” five years in the 1990s, Hall got an early sense of which way the political wind was blowing across the pond. As a result, “the current iteration of diverse liberalism and extreme right-wing thinking in America – talk of manifest destiny, arms, patriarchy, democratic rollback – doesn’t surprise me as much as it does others,” she says. “Although it’s still horrifying.” She was in the US for 9/11 and witnessed “racial tension, domestic and external fundamentalism and a state response to it”, as well as “genuine visionary politics and radical environmentalism”, which inspired The Carhullan Army. The wolf reintroduction programmes in the Pacific Northwest influenced The Wolf Border. “So perhaps I can say the experience of the USA enhanced and amplified my creative proclivities and propositions. I think that a good import and it’s tariff free!”

This is a book that faces the awful possibility of a wind’s death amid climate collapse

One of the joys of Helm lies in the lively female characters, who form relationships with the wind and treat it as an entity worthy of respect, instead of seeking to subdue, measure, shame or resist it. This reminded me that it’s often persuasive women, like the late Jane Goodall or rewilding queen Isabella Tree who implement real changes in thinking. And more divisive ones, like Greta Thunberg, who make sure the biggest environmental and political issues of our age don’t get sidelined.

“Many powerful female visionaries get hammered, scapegoated, burned, crucified, written out of history or into it as a deviant,” says Hall. “But we are capable of reassessing their legacies.” She believes that, “as a truth-teller, Greta seems inherently 4000 times more powerful than Trump or Andrew Tate. There is nothing so formidable as a righteous woman prophet and activist. Terrifying for men!” Hall argues that “the next trick for women is sorority, from the local to the global. It’s the way to consolidate power shifts and positive change. Men need to respond positively to feminism too, to find a benign cooperative partnership and clean up their own in-house mess. [They should] hold other men to account more.”

One of the key male characters in Helm gets a life-changing encounter with the wind. Piloting a glider four thousand feet above the fells, he’s lifted into a rapture of sorts. “Immense bliss, abandonment… he was inside it, like sex.” I’ll leave that story – like the Helm itself – up in the air for you to discover.

As we say goodbye, Hall leaves me reflecting on the power of stories to shift our thinking about the climate crisis and our impact on the environment. Clearly, the survival of the planet relies on more than science and politics: our imaginative involvement in the landscape is essential if we are to be persuaded by her “radical optimism” for driving change.

Helen Brown is an arts journalist writing regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Daily Mail