Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Jean McNeil is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada. She has published fifteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Journey Prize for Short Fiction, the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation literary awards (twice) and the Pushcart Prize. She has twice won the Prism International Prize, once for short fiction and again for creative non-fiction. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016. Her most recent novel, Day for Night, was awarded the gold medal in the literary fiction category of the Independent Publishers Awards in the US in 2022. She has been writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, with the Natural Environment Research Council in Greenland, and has undertaken official residencies in the Falkland Islands and in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. For the past 15 years she has lived for part of the year in South Africa and Kenya, where she is a trained safari guide. McNeil is Professor and Director of the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia and lives in London.<p>"In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (<em>Fire on the Mountain</em>) draws from decades of travel to the world's most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she's recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose... McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." <strong>— Publishers Weekly</strong></p>
<p>"Meditative and sumptuous,<em>Latitudes</em> is Jean McNeil's brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change. McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." <strong>— Foreword Reviews, Starred Review</strong></p>
<p>"McNeil's lifetime of exploratory journeys have taken her into landscapes that vanishingly few of us will ever see. In shimmering prose, and with her fiercely ethical and sharp eye, McNeil conjures maps of lands known and unknown. <em>Latitudes</em> is a book of great beauty." <strong>— Margie Orford, author of <em>The Eye of the Beholder</em></strong></p>
<p>"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." — <strong>Julia Bell, author of <em>Massive</em> and Hymnal</strong></p>
<p>"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year… It's a really brave examination of self and of humankind, but ultimately it's a beautiful love letter to the Earth." —<strong> Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio</strong></p>
"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." Foreword Reviews
"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal
"Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance." Margie Orford
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.
Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.
By the end of August the upcountry winter is softening. I no longer wake in my tent at 5am to puffs of condensed breath, then have to execute my mad scramble to put on five layers in the ten-degree cold. But the coming of the equatorial spring also signals the end of our time at Lewa. Soon we will return to our ordinary lives, scattering to jobs now forgotten about, family kept in touch with by one desultory text a week.
Group endeavour, especially in the wilderness, is an unsought totalising environment, like joining the Army or a cult by mistake. In any group dynamics there are turning points. The internal hardening of our group, until this point friendly and supportive, has a reverse mirror in the bush around us. It is hard to locate when or why the tenor of our group changed. I know I had fallen out of favour with Max over the previous few days because he has discovered I have a saviour complex.
We were out walking near camp on a birding expedition when we came upon what we thought was a dead African dormouse, a common savannah-dwelling rodent. We stopped to inspect it. Its silky, golden fur shone in the slanting morning sun, filtered through a mesh of acacia leaves. The animal's large blackcurrant eyes were squeezed shut. As we circled around it, it twitched. A shriek came from the fever tree above us. We looked up to see a familiar form: a black-shouldered kite.
'Ah, the old playing dead trick,' Max said. 'The kite had its eye on the mouse before we came along. It might even have caught it and dropped it and is waiting for us to leave.'
I looked at the small creature in the grass below us, how its eyes were screwed tight against themselves. Its look of terror and dejection was familiar to me, but in a way that was watery and indistinct, like a faint signal picked up from a distant galaxy or another lifetime.
I bent down and picked up the dormouse. It seemed to weigh as much as a paperclip. It opened its eyes and gave me an inscrutable look. Probably it thought I was the kite, and its life was at an end.
'What are you doing?' Max barked.
'I'm giving it a chance.' I walked away, the dormouse held between my fingers, looking over my shoulder to make sure the kite was not watching. At that moment the bird flung itself from the branch and levered itself into the sky like a jump-jet Harrier. It flew away, a scar against the sky. I deposited the dormouse beneath a large fallen branch. It wiggled out of my fingers, shook itself, and bolted into the grass.
For the rest of the day Max would not speak to me. One of the cardinal rules of guiding is never to intervene in a situation between animals, on two grounds: one, you might get hurt. But more important is the principle that the food chain is a self-regulatory mechanism. Lion, hyena and wild dog might collectively be a hellhound, but predators need to eat in order to survive. Someone has to be killed, otherwise the trophic pyramid – the ecological dynamic that has evolved over billions of years in a particular ecosystem – would crumble.