Overview

""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 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.

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9781909954113

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"""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. LATITUDES is a book of great beauty."" - Margie Orford, author of The Eye of the Beholder"

"""In Latitudes Jean McNeil evokes the elusive and vanishing  places she has, in a lifetime as a writer, conservationist and teacher, given herself over to—the Antarctic, Greenland, the Namibian desert. These remote and elemental  places survive just on the periphery of the Anthropocene era, which has gripped and is smothering the Earth that sustains us. 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. McNeil's life time 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 and, in her search for a way to write outside of the narrowness of human perception, of the soul. It is rare that one feels so strongly the writer as companion and guide, but in Latitudes, that is what Jean McNeil is. Her shimmering prose, which walks us through the most remote of lands and sails us over the darkest of oceans—both psychic and literal—gives solace and new ways to imagine how we might live cooperatively with our planetary home. How we might both love and fear it. How we might protect it. Latitudes is a book of great beauty. Both elegaic and hopeful, it is both tribute and testament to the places Jean has loved, feared attended to, listened to, and felt with such nuance."" - Margie Orford, author of The Eye of the Beholder"

Author Information

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.

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