On her first morning in an Antarctic field camp, Sara Wheeler watched a scientist come sprinting across the ice, wind pants around his ankles. Why? A seal had surfaced through the hole beneath the camp toilet. She’d spent two years and every spare penny getting there, as the first female writer in residence under the US Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.
Wheeler grew up in a working-class Bristol family where the Daily Express was the only paper in the house and “abroad” was regarded with outright suspicion, until a package tour to Moscow put her, at eleven, in a newspaper photo with George Best. She went on to read classics at Oxford on a scholarship, then spent a career writing about polar exploration, Russia, and, most recently, a biography of Jan Morris.
In this episode, Wheeler tells host Rajan Datar how her seven months in Antarctica left her with a conviction she's carried through every book since: that no one, however credentialed, owns a place.
#travel #AntarcticaWriting #SaraWheeler
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