The Antarctic: An Anthology

Description

The Antarctic features an international mix of classic first-person accounts of exploration, literary travelogues and works of cultural history, natural science and fiction about the South Pole. Contributors include British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese and Russian explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Robert Falcon Scott, Richard Byrd, and Douglas Mawson; novelists such as H.P. Lovecraft, Diane Ackerman, Jenny Diski and Kim Stanley Robinson and popular travel writers such as Sara Wheeler. Published alongside the companion volume, The Arctic: An Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Francis Spufford is the author of I May Be Some Time, a cultural history of the British obsession with polar exploring, The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, all published by Faber & Faber. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year prize, and the Writers Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year. In 2004 he was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. He lives in Cambridge.

Some superb nature writing ... display[ing] the beauty and vulnerability of these regions * Guardian * Some real talent - [here are] writers who not only know their subject, but who can also discuss it with colour and elegance * Good Book Guide * A glorious taste of the cold south in all its bewildering, vengeful complexity * Financial Times *