Latitudes

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.

"In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (Fire on the Mountain) draws from decades of travel to the world's most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she's recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose... McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." — Publishers Weekly"Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil's brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change. McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." — Foreword Reviews, Starred Review"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"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"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year… It's a really brave examination of self and of humankind, but ultimately it's a beautiful love letter to the Earth." — Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio"Latitudes is for all its aesthetic intensity a melancholy volume, with an elegiac tone that is at points overwhelming. At the same time, it is a book that will linger with you long after you have turned the last page." — Sarah Birch, The Hackney Citizen

• PrologueixPart I: We Walked Out of This Land1Ephemeral8Running13The Edge of Reality17The Quenching23The Trophic Pyramid28Part II: The Bowl of Winter35Uncharted Waters42Albedo48Paleo People54Ilulissat59Hotel Arctic63Part III: The End of Desire71Las Islas78Stone Runs83Storm Petrel90Part IV: Bitter Pastoral99The Land With No Fat105The Skeleton Coast110Part V: The Blue Desert121Departures132The Ninth Wave135Crossing the Line141Dark Ocean148Part VI: Bush of Ghosts157Lion Charge163The Ivory Trail169The Firing Range176Black Mamba180Part VII: The Land of Letting Go191Bluefields197Magic!202The Last Glacial Maximum210The Far Field216Part VIII: The Rainy Season221Cloudforest227All Men Want to Know232Currents237Part IX: Boreal243The Quickening251Latitudes257Epilogue261Acknowledgements267