Book Launch: Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere

Ranging across the Southern Hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies. The essays present works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the South has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, including different forms of life writing, allowing us to better conceptualise the planet ‘from below’.

Hear from the collection’s editors and four of the contributors on how artists have interpreted Scott’s famous Terra Nova hut, ‘tsunami, tornados, and tides’ in Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction; the watery resonances in Dambudzo Marechera’s famous novel House of Hunger; and remote poetic imaginings of Antarctica.