Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler was born in Bristol in 1961 and began her career writing about Greece before the Antarctic took hold of her imagination. Terra Incognita (1996) is the result of seven months spent at the American McMurdo Station and on expeditions across the ice — the longest stay of any writer-in-residence in Antarctic history.

The book is remarkable partly because Antarctica has almost no human story — there are no indigenous peoples, no history before the 20th century, no villages or cities or ordinary life. Wheeler had to find her material in the scientists, the supply workers, the occasional tourists, and above all in the landscape itself — which she rendered with a clarity and grandeur that matched its actual scale.

She also excavated the history of Antarctic exploration — Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Mawson — and wove it into her account of the present. The dead are always present in her book; the ice preserves things.

Her subsequent books have been biographies — of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the writer-naturalist who went to Antarctica with Scott; of the explorer Denys Finch Hatton; of the polar explorer Peter Scott — which suggests that the Antarctic sent her toward lives shaped by extreme environments. She has also written about Tierra del Fuego and Chile's far south, landscapes at the other extreme end of the world.