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Latitudes

Encounters with a Changing Planet

Jean McNeil

$34.99

Paperback

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English
Barbican Press
02 July 2025
2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist

""McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff.""Publishers Weekly

Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.

Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.
By:  
Imprint:   Barbican Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 127mm, 
ISBN:   9781909954113
ISBN 10:   190995411X
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Prologue ix Part I: We Walked Out of This Land 1 Ephemeral 8 Running 13 The Edge of Reality 17 The Quenching 23 The Trophic Pyramid 28 Part II: The Bowl of Winter 35 Uncharted Waters 42 Albedo 48 Paleo People 54 Ilulissat 59 Hotel Arctic 63 Part III: The End of Desire 71 Las Islas 78 Stone Runs 83 Storm Petrel 90 Part IV: Bitter Pastoral 99 The Land With No Fat 105 The Skeleton Coast 110 Part V: The Blue Desert 121 Departures 132 The Ninth Wave 135 Crossing the Line 141 Dark Ocean 148 Part VI: Bush of Ghosts 157 Lion Charge 163 The Ivory Trail 169 The Firing Range 176 Black Mamba 180 Part VII: The Land of Letting Go 191 Bluefields 197 Magic! 202 The Last Glacial Maximum 210 The Far Field 216 Part VIII: The Rainy Season 221 Cloudforest 227 All Men Want to Know 232 Currents 237 Part IX: Boreal 243 The Quickening 251 Latitudes 257 Epilogue 261 Acknowledgements 267

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 for Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet

""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


  • Short-listed for The Banff Environmental Literature Award 2025 (Canada)

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