Three months alongside scientists
The British Antarctic Survey has appointed young British writer, Melanie Challenger, as Artist in Residence for International Polar Year 2007-8. She will live in the Antarctic for three months, working alongside the scientists in the region and gaining access to regions of the Antarctic totally closed to the general public. She will stay on board the RSS James Clark Ross.
This appointment comes at a particularly significant stage in global polar and environmental research. She will be writing a prose book “Extinction” which will narrate her epic voyage alongside the cycles of extinction affecting human society and culture and the equilibrium of our planet. Antarctica’s physical and emotional power has inspired generations of artists and she will narrate sights of rare privilege as a young woman placed in an awesome and dangerous backdrop.
She will leave in October with the British Antarctic Survey team, journeying from Falkland Islands to South Georgia, and onwards to the Antarctica, where she will travel to the deep field sites of the continent. Here, she will witness the global scientific effort to understand what has happened to our planet and what the future might hold.
Melanie won the 2005 Society of Author’s Eric Gregory Award for poetry and has been nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection. She has been involved in social activism and education since 2000, which has included her adaptation of the Anne Frank diaries for an oratorio by James Whitbourn, and an ongoing collaboration with Bosnian war diarist, Zlata Filipovic for Stolen Voices (Viking Penguin: 2006), a project on young people in conflict. She and Filipovic have spoken publicly across the US and UK in diverse settings from major universities to high schools, the World Affairs Council, the United Nations, and the Washington Senate, to the United States Institute for Peace. They received the 2006 Attaway Professorships in Civic Culture.
You can find out more about Melanie on the website below
More information: www.saltpublishing.com and www.antarctica.ac.uk
Green News 
