Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On January 12, 2027, we’ll discuss After the North Pole by Erling Kagge, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.
From acclaimed Norwegian explorer, philosopher, and writer Erling Kagge comes the astounding story of his record-setting 58-day journey on skis to the North Pole, laced with profound meditations on nature, other daredevils and the history of our obsession with the Pole.
The North Pole is the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation. Its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding. Kagge and his friend Børge Ousland became the first people to ever reach the pole without any support from man or machine, skiing from a drop-off point on the ice edge of Canada’s northernmost island. After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice recounts the expedition while probing its physical challenges and psychological motivations, as well as the extensive history of the territory’s exploration—marked as it was by scandal, murder, shipwreck, shifting ice and roaming polar bears— and its place in legend and art.
“It’s impossible to read Erling Kagge and not fall in love with the North Pole. His enthusiasm is infectious, and his adventures are epic.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
After the North Pole is available in hardback, ebook and audiobook from HarperCollins and various other retailers.