Today's world suffers from a crisis of the political imagination. If history is a symbiotic relationship between the past as a 'field of experience' and the future as 'horizon of expectation', in our time this dialectic seems to have vanished: the world has retreated into the present and does not seem able to project itself into the future. This predicament contributes to a vast array of worrying cultural and social phenomena. How can we reignite the political imagination to tackle today's global issues? And how could we become better at imagining the society in which we might like to live a generation or two from now? My project addresses these questions by creating a mutually illuminating dialogue between contemporary literature and the question of political imagination. I argue that political imagination can be best conceptualised by establishing a 'conceptual triangle' with 'global responsibility', and 'transformative collective action'. The project explores and analyses this conceptual triangle through literature, and takes the question of political imagination as an opportunity for reflecting on the status and role of literature in the age of 'presentism'.