Latitudes

Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an epoch of heat, as well as posing urgent questions informed by years of writing about climate change and the natural world.

What does it feel like to be alive in the Anthropocene?

An account of thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada. It combines place-based writing, memoir and travelogue to offer a witness account of the living in and writing about nature, the wilderness and the environment in the Anthropocene.

Latitudes also explores questions central to creative writing and artistic practice. Through her long experience of reading and teaching fiction and non-fiction, in particular nature writing, McNeil examines the question of the role of writers in an age of dramatic ecological loss. Only by mustering a radical attentiveness to the non-human world, the book argues, will we rediscover our balance, individually and as a civilisation, and gain perspective on the uncanniness of our present era.