New Writing

Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet is the new book by UEA Professor and Director of Creative Writing Jean McNeil and is published by Barbican Press this week. Jean is the author of multiple books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and travel, most recently Ice Diaries: an Antarctic Memoir, which was the winner of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival’s Grand Prize in 2016, and was named a best nature book of the year by The Guardian in 2018; Anthropocene Diary, which was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Nonfiction Prize; and Day For Night, which won the gold medal in the literary fiction category at the 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) in the USA. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Governor-General’s Prize for fiction in Canada and the Journey Prize for short fiction in Canada. She has twice been the Mellon Foundation Visiting Scholar in South Africa, works for part of each year in South Africa and Kenya, and has undertaken residencies with the British Antarctic Survey, in the Falkland Islands, in Svalbard and Greenland and has been writer-in-residence on several ship-based oceanographic expeditions.