IMAS researcher’s book nominated for Premier’s Literary Prizes

IMAS researcher Elizabeth Leane’s book South Pole: Nature and Culture has been shortlisted for the 2017 Margaret Scott Prize, one of the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes.

Drawing on her literary and scientific training, Associate Professor Leane offers an interdisciplinary history of the symbolic heart of Antarctica in the book, which was released in May last year.

A review in the prestigious international scientific journal Nature described South Pole as "a detailed, compelling portrait of a place at once central and marginal, fantastically inhospitable and beautiful, and a mecca for physicists, government claimants and extreme tourists."

Associate Professor Leane currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship split between the University of Tasmania’s School of Humanities and IMAS.

In 2004, she travelled to Antarctica on an Arts Fellowship with the Australian Antarctic Division, a journey that included stopovers at Casey Station and Macquarie Island and fed into her 2012 book Antarctica in Fiction.

South Pole is shortlisted together with Heather Rose’s novel The Museum of Modern Love, and Anne Kellas’s collection The White Room Poems.

The winner of the $5000 Margaret Scott Prize, which honours the author, poet, educator and public intellectual who died in 2005, will be announced on 27 November at Government House.