Authors Electric

  Svalbard I read a lot of books about the Arctic before I managed to go there.  I would like to recommend Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver. Also Michael Palin’s Erebus , and An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. These are both more or less factual, and there is of course a whole host of of Children’s fiction featuring snow and ice from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights . It may well have been Narnia that first attracted me to the snowy landscapes that were all too uncommon in my childhood, and even more so today with global warming. Although I have been north four times, I have only seen the Northern Lights once, and then faintly for fifteen minutes in Norway. Iceland and Greenland both failed to deliver anything except heavy cloud cover. However, my trip in June was during was during 24 hour daylight, and the object of the exercise was to see a polar bear in its natural environment.   The Arctic is expensive. I went ...

Foreign travel has always been an invaluable source of inspiration for me, and I have used icy settings on more than one occasion – Jinx on the Divide , and Ice Feathers in particular. Covid-19 meant several cancelled trips abroad, and about ten months ago I looked for the place least likely to present problems. Greenland has a population of just over 56,000, so no danger of massive crowds anywhere, very few cases of coronavirus and no deaths. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get there, and although we booked the holiday last March, thinking there was very little chance of it going ahead, by sheer chance we managed a small window of opportunity between when Greenland would let us in and whatever changes the new Omicron variant may bring. And what a source of inspiration it turned out to be. We didn’t manage to see the Northern Lights, due to cloud, but that was the only downside. We were based at two centres. Two nights at Kangerlussuaq, which is where the main airport i...