Novels 'better at explaining world's problems than reports'

Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as
facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University
and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Novels should be
required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity,
politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes
does,” said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World
Poverty Institute.

He said: “Despite the regular flow of academic
studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably
novelists who do as good a job – if not a better one – of representing
and communicating the realities of international development. — Telegraph