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Artist and poet Himali Singh Soin explores the North Pole as a mythologised space in literature.

Reading novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Captain of the Pole Star at school in India, the North Pole was portrayed to her as a blank, white, mysterious and uninhabited place. It was only later, travelling to Norway's Svalbard archipelago and reading stories that placed the Arctic outside of the colonial imagination, that Himali started to challenge these images.

In conversation with her father - the explorer and responsible tourism advocate Mandip Singh Soin - Himali discusses the consequences of mythologising this huge region of different lands and cultures at the top of the world. How has the North Pole of the literary imagination influenced how people behave in and towards the Arctic and its peoples?

Drawing a line from the Ancients, through Margaret Cavendish’s 17th century novel The Blazing World, to contemporary literature, she considers how the North Pole holds a multitude of powerful stories that affect everyone in our entangled world.

Featuring Michael Bravo from the Scott Polar Research Institute and Department of Geography, Cambridge; Professor Adriana Craciun, Boston University; and authors Tanya Tagaq and Sam J. Miller.

Readings by Deborah Shorinde
Science historian: Alexis Rider
Excerpt(s) from Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq, Copyright © 2018
Excerpts of music by David Soin Tappeser, Score for string quartet, ‘we are opposite like that’, a film by Himali Singh Soin, 2019
Photo credit: we are opposite like that, 2017-2022. Courtesy of Himali Singh Soin.

Produced by Andrea Rangecroft
A Falling Tree production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4