From an unparalleled life of extreme encounters with the natural world, Jean McNeil brings us keen insights on how to respond to a changing planet.

As a young girl in Nova Scotia, her grandmother taught her to shoot animals for food and she rescued a wolf fallen through ice. Where do you go from there? Cross Arctic seas, become a professional African safari guide, deliver the guidebook to Costa Rica, lock yourself in an Antarctic research station, write your heart out. All the while keep listening, for the living world is speaking to you if you open yourself to hear its voice.

We are obsessed with human stories. What happens if we shift focus and bond with the non-human? Read Latitudes and enter the natural world on its own terms.

"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." - Margie Orford

About the Author
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.

Reviews

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9781909954113
Author Jean McNeil
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Barbican Press
Publisher Barbican Press