Fifty Words for Snow

After a year of voyaging through dictionaries in search of snow stories from around the world, I'm over the moon to announce my new book Fifty Words for Snow published this week by Elliott & Thompson. 

Fifty Words for Snow covers the alphabet from avalanche (French) to zud (Mongolian). It is a compendium of worldwide winter words: from American Sign Language (via a story of snowboarding at the Deaflympics) and Hawaiian (how snow comes to the aid of environmentalists protesting a giant telescope on a sacred mountain) to Tibetan (the beautiful snow lotus, which is collected for its medicinal uses) and Russian (the sastrugi which bedevil explorers in Antarctica yet help them orient their steps). I look at contemporary kunstschnee in movies such as Red Sparrow and Bladerunner 2, and discover the legends surrounding Itztlacoliuhqui, the terrifying ancient Aztec god of Frost.

Fifty Words for Snow can be ordered online through many retailers including Waterstones and Blackwells, or any independent bookshop. Please order from small businesses where possible, as these vital need support now more than ever.

 

The Library of Ice: Reviews

It's one month since the publication of The Library of Ice, and I'm grateful that the book has received incredibly perceptive and positive reviews. My thanks to all the reviewers, and a special shout out to Patrick Barkham for selecting The Library of Ice as one of the Best Books of 2018 in the nature category in The Guardian. Here's a round up of reviews available online - click on the link to read in full.

• "A refreshing lack of romanticism." Gavin Francis in The Guardian
• "Campbell ... has invented a new kind of time-travel-writing. She is, unquestionably, one of our brightest stars." Horatio Clare in The Spectator
• "At the end of her wanderings, which are simply but beautifully related, Ms Campbell returns to her few belongings in storage in London. Nothing much remains; treasures have broken; all is in flux, like the heaving, disappearing icebergs she has left behind, with their fragile cargo of human remains.' Anonymous, reviewed with Christopher Pinney's The Waterless Sea in The Economist
• "An intellectual omnivore..." Barbara Kiser in Nature
• "Campbell’s book puts a personal slant on the conservation of texts and languages, on the importance of saving both centuries of human endeavor and the landscapes that inspired them." Anna Souter in Hyperallergic
• "In this journey, she has joined the dots between nations who don’t always recognise their primary interdependence." Sally Moss in ClimateCultures
• "an essential read for anyone interested in the mutable, multi-faceted qualities of ice". Dani Redd in The Island Review

Two anthologies

I'm delighted to have poems in two anthologies published by The Emma Press this summer: 

Some Cannot Be Caught: The Emma Press Book of Beasts, edited by Anja Konig and Liane Strauss and illustrated by Emma Wright (available here)

and In Transit: Poems of Travel, edited by Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs (available here).

The Library of Ice - new publication

I'm delighted to announce that The Library of Ice, a memoir of my seven-year adventure in search of the world's disappearing ice, will be published this autumn by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster - and copies are now available to pre-order. Thank you to everyone who has accompanied me on these journeys, both in the Arctic and back home, especially those who assisted with my research over the last year. If you'd like to be kept informed about the launch event in November 2018, please email me: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk