Population: about 1,000 people in winter, millions of penguins · Literary prizes: 0
Penguins can't write yet. Until they can, here are some books about Antarctica by people who went there, or wished they had.
Antarctica's flagship prize
Open to any book written by a penguin, in any language a penguin speaks. Winners since 2000: none. The jury meets every winter, huddled together for warmth, and has yet to receive a manuscript. One entry was a fish.
No English yet We'll keep checking.
Like everything else on this site, these came to English from another language.
Jules Verne · 1897
Translated from French by Frederick Paul Walter
Verne was so taken with Poe’s Pym that he wrote the sequel himself: a voyage into the polar sea to find out what became of Pym’s companions. This edition includes Poe’s novel too.
Jean-Baptiste Charcot · 1910
Translated from French by Philip Walsh
The journal of the second French Antarctic expedition, 1908–1910, led by a doctor who named his ship “Why not?”.
Roald Amundsen · 1912
Translated from Norwegian by A. G. Chater
The first man at the South Pole tells how he got there in 1911: with skis, dogs and a great deal of planning, a month ahead of Scott.
Sakyo Komatsu · 1964
Translated from Japanese by Daniel Huddleston
A virus made in a lab wipes out humanity, except for the few hundred people at the research stations in Antarctica.
Andrey Kurkov · 1996
Translated from Russian by George Bird
A struggling writer in Kyiv shares his flat with Misha, a depressed king penguin, and is hired to write obituaries of people who are still alive. The way out leads to Antarctica.
Albert Sánchez Piñol · 2002
Translated from Catalan by Cheryl Leah Morgan
A weather official is posted to a tiny island near the Antarctic Circle, where the lighthouse keeper and he fight off creatures from the sea every night.
Marie Darrieussecq · 2003
Translated from French by Ian Monk
Two people signed up for a season at a European research base fall for each other.
Cixin Liu · 2003
Translated from Chinese by Joel Martinsen
A supernova kills everyone over thirteen, and the children left in charge of the world end up holding their war games in Antarctica.
Ilija Trojanow · 2011
Translated from German by Philip Boehm
A glaciologist who loves the ice works as a guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, and comes apart as he watches it melt.
Monsters, scientists, runaway mothers and one very determined teenager.
Edgar Allan Poe · 1838
Mutiny, shipwreck and cannibalism, then a voyage into the far southern sea that ends at a giant white figure. Poe never explained it.
H. P. Lovecraft · 1936
A university expedition finds the ruins of an ancient city beyond a range of impossible mountains. The geologist telling the story begs you not to go.
John W. Campbell · 1938
Scientists at a remote Antarctic station thaw out a creature that can turn into any one of them. The novella behind the film The Thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin · 1982
Stories, among them “Sur”: the secret report of nine South American women who reached the South Pole in 1909, before Amundsen, and decided not to tell anyone.
Kim Stanley Robinson · 1997
Guides, scientists and eco-saboteurs in the near future, as the treaty that protects the continent starts to come apart.
Caroline Alexander · 1997
Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, told in the diary of the ship’s cat. The closest thing on this shelf to a book by an animal.
Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber · 1998
Graphic novels about a US Marshal trying to solve murders at McMurdo Station, where everyone looks the same in a parka.
Geraldine McCaughrean · 2005
A teenager in love with the long-dead Captain Oates is taken on a reckless trek across Antarctica by her unstable “uncle”.
Kevin Brockmeier · 2006
As a plague empties the world, a woman is stranded alone at an Antarctic research station, while the dead she remembers wait in a city of their own.
Mat Johnson · 2011
A professor convinced that Poe’s Pym was true leads an all-Black crew to Antarctica to prove it. A satire, and the perfect chaser for Poe.
Maria Semple · 2012
A girl in Seattle goes looking for her vanished mother, and the trail leads to a family cruise to Antarctica.
Jon McGregor · 2021
A survey trip in Antarctica goes wrong, and the veteran field guide comes home after a stroke, unable to say what happened.
Ally Wilkes · 2022
Horror: after the First World War, a stowaway’s expedition is wrecked in the Weddell Sea and must winter on the ice with something that wants them.
Frostbite, shipwrecks, madness and paperwork, all of it real.
Ernest Shackleton · 1919
Shackleton’s own account of the Endurance, crushed by the ice in 1915, and how every one of his men got home.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard · 1922
Scott’s last expedition, by one of its youngest members, including a winter trek in total darkness to collect three emperor penguin eggs.
Richard E. Byrd · 1938
Byrd spent the winter of 1934 by himself in a hut buried in the ice, where fumes from his own stove slowly poisoned him.
Alfred Lansing · 1959
The Shackleton story again, told from the crew’s diaries and interviews with the survivors.
Sara Wheeler · 1996
Seven months at the research stations, with the scientists, the cold and the continent’s history.
Jenny Diski · 1997
Diski goes on a cruise to Antarctica in search of pure white nothingness, and finds her own past waiting for her.
Nicholas Johnson · 2005
A darkly funny insider’s account of life and bureaucracy at the US stations, where the real danger is the paperwork.
David Roberts · 2013
Douglas Mawson loses both companions on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1912–13 and walks back alone.
Julian Sancton · 2021
In 1898 the Belgica froze into the ice, and its crew lived through the sunless Antarctic winter, with a young Amundsen on board.
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Met a penguin who writes? Tell me. Otherwise, back to the parts of the globe with prizes.