For years, Gavin yearned to go to the remotest place on our planet, to see one of the strangest beasts alive. This is how he came to spend fourteen months living alongside emperor penguins as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica.
This prospect of silence and solitude also drew him south; to a place with no distractions and very little human history, but one that offered a rare opportunity to explore the world of the emperor penguin. Masters of endurance, they flourish in this coldest and most inhospitable region on earth, and Gavin wondered whether he could learn something from them.
Empire Antarctica tells us Gavin's story about following the penguins throughout the year – from a summer of perpetual sunshine to three and a half months of winter darkness – he guides us through the strange moods and manners of Antarctic living. Amid the ice and austerity, where the legends of Scott and Shackleton still loom large, Gavin Francis explored the hardship of living at 50 degrees below zero, and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring.
Gavin’s book Empire Antarctica is the story of one man and his obsession with a continent, mapping not only a place but landscapes of the mind. Empire Antarctica combines an evocative and enchanting narrative with sublime sensitivity to the natural world.
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Reviews
‘A valuable addition to polar literature, vividly describing the brutal, but beautiful, realities of undergoing an Antarctic winter.’ Sir Ranulph Fiennes
‘Empire Antarctica is the embodiment of everything I admire in travel writing – a great journey, intense isolation, wide reading, vivid writing, scientific research, and something in the nature of an old-fashioned ordeal. That Gavin Francis is a medical doctor, with an important role to play in the darkness and cold at the ends of the earth, is a bonus. I loved this book.’ Paul Theroux
Gavin will be appearing at this year's Book Festival on Sunday 3 November at 7.45PM
Buy tickets for Gavin's Event
About the Author
Gavin Francis was born in 1975 and brought up in Fife, Scotland. After qualifying from medical school in Edinburgh, he spent 10 years travelling, visiting all seven continents. He has worked in Africa, India made several trips to the Arctic and crossed Eurasia and Australasia by motorcycle. His first book True North was published in 2008. He has lectured at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the Edinburgh Book Festival and is a regular speaker at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He lives in Edinburgh.
Follow Gavin on Twitter - @DrGavinFrancis
Gavin's website
Buy tickets for the Scottish Book Awards (Saturday 2 November at 6.15PM)
