Jean McNeil is the author of thirteen books, including six novels and a collection of short fiction, a collection of poetry, a travel guide and literary essays. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award for fiction and the Journey Prize for short fiction (Canada). Her 2016 book Ice Diaries: an Antarctic Memoir, which The New York Times has called 'stunningly written', won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival Book Competition.One of McNeil's best books to explore the Antarctic, as shared at the Guardian:
“It appears out of the fog and low clouds, like a white comet in the twilight.” [Environmental historian Stephen J] Pyne opens hisRead about the other entries on the list.thrilling survey The Ice on this looming note. He obeys his own dictum to find a language worthy of the place in this narrative steeped in science and history and so commandingly written it is best read a few paragraphs at a time, to savour the cold voltage of his prose. Structured by the stratigraphy of the continent, with sections titled The Berg, The Sheet, The Glacier, The Ice’s vertiginous language voices the Antarctic’s Wagnerian grandeur and unpacks its image as a blank space to reveal its true character: a metaphor, an enigma.
--Marshal Zeringue
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