The Antarctic | Granta

  • Published: 01/10/2008
  • ISBN: 9781847080288
  • 130x20mm
  • 288 pages

The Antarctic

Francis Spufford

The Antarctic: An Anthology 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, Apsely Cherry-Garrard, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd and Fouglas Mawson; novelists such as H. P. Lovecraft, Diane Ackerman, Jenny Diski and Kim Stanley Robinson; and popular travel writers such as Sara Wheeler. It is published alongside acompanion volume, The Arctic: An Anthology.

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

The Author

Francis Spufford is the author of I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, a cultural history of the British obsession with polar exploration, The Child that Books Built and Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin. 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. He lives in Cambridge.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

The Ends Of The Earth

Francis Spufford

The Ends of the Earth is an elegant boxed set of two hardcover books featuring a selection of the greatest writing about the Arctic and the Antarctic. Contributors include: Roald Amundsen, Beryl Bainbridge, Andrea Barrett, James Buchan, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Jenny Diski, Tim Flannery, Jon Krakauer, Haldor Laxness, Ursula LeGuin, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Barry Lopez, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Peary, Knud Rasmussen, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Jules Verne, Sara Wheeler and many more.

Francis Spufford on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

The Habit

Francis Spufford

Fiction | Granta 67

On Observation Hill

Francis Spufford

‘Here I stand on Observation Hill. If the Devil made me an offer at this moment, I feel sure I would accept.’

Essays & Memoir | Granta 6

The Story of a Variation

Milan Kundera

‘I have often heard it said that the novel has already exhausted all its possibilities. I have the opposite impression: that in four hundred years of existence the novel has missed many of its opportunities: it has left many great opportunities unexploited, many roads forgotten, many calls unheard.’